The AMR Family (Me, Mr, Baby, Dog – no Cat) has just returned from an impromptu mini-holiday on the Isle of Wight. Four nights in a slightly damp and musty cottage, two days of sunshine and two of rain. The typical British summer holiday, then, if a little on the short side.
I booked the cottage last weekend when I saw that there was going to be a heatwave. (Apparently. It never materialised.) Now I am obsessed (almost to the point where it’s an ailment) with “making the most of the sunshine”. Many Brits are, I think, simply because we spend so much of the summer feeling shortchanged – either the hot days are thin on the ground, or you get plenty of hot days but they fall on the times when you have a load of deadlines and skiving off is simply not an option. Oh, the steaming hot afternoons I spent in my garden office, staring out at the lawn as it slowly turned into hay, gazing mournfully at the empty deckchair I had so optimistically placed in a south-facing position. Unfortunately it’s borderline impossible to work on a laptop in bright sunshine and so I just watched the summer hazily slip by…
So when I saw the weather forecast (which these days seems to be so inaccurate it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was compiled by a layman who simply stands on the roof of his house, holding a windsock in one hand and a barometer in the other, shouting his guesstimations down the phone to someone at the BBC) I immediately s...