bank holiday washout

The rain arrived, half an hour later than the Met Office forecast suggested it would, but once it came, it stayed.  Forewarned is forearmed, and I settled down to enjoy a wet day.  There is a sort of pleasant melancholy about steady summer rain, which makes me feel vaguely as though I must be on holiday, reminding me of wet afternoons sitting in seaside cafes, or days spent reading in my bunk, moving only to rearrange the mugs under the drips from the deck seams, or make the tremendous effort of lighting the primus stove for a cup of tea.  It must have rained sometimes on working days, but I suppose that when I was in an office I didn't notice so much.  Of course, today is a holiday of sorts, being the second August Bank Holiday, and I feel vaguely sorry for all those people organising outdoor events, which will have been very damp squibs, while being selfishly relieved that we hadn't planned to go anywhere.

I started by making a cake, and discovered that my new, round, loose based, six inch cake tin has a small gap all the way around, where the bottom is rolled over to make a ledge for the base to sit on, which cake mixture gets into during cooking, and which takes an absolute age to wash.  I spent a long time scrubbing at it under a running tap, while the crumbs rolled round the rim ahead of the bristles of the washing up brush.  I was going to leave some customer feedback on the Lakeland site, but couldn't remember my password to log in, and never received a reply to my password reset request.  Maybe I never had a password.  It is a very heavy tin, and non stick, and would be excellent if it didn't take a good ten minutes to wash after use.

After that I did my ironing, before it could develop into a terrifying mountain like it did last time, and listened to Spiegel im Spiegel.  It goes at the right pace for ironing, and bores the Systems Administrator to tears, so the spare bedroom is the best place to listen to it.

Then I ordered a pair of waterproof boots I've had my eye on.  Today's weather made me think it was time to get on with this.  The shoes that have done me for the past couple of years are by now so shabby that they're more fit for garden visiting than the Tate members' room, and are not as waterproof as they were.  It's a perpetual gripe of mine that most women's shoes seem to be designed on the basis that you won't want to walk more than a hundred yards in them, and won't go outside at all if it's raining.  For goodness sake, even people who work in offices and would rather take the tube from Liverpool Street to the West End than undertake the forty minute walk still need to get from their house to the station, and might want to go out to buy a sandwich at lunchtime.  I am experimenting with Sorel, a Canadian brand I saw mentioned somewhere as selling boots that were both walkable and waterproof without looking entirely as though one were shod for a quick ascent of Scafell, and will report back when they've arrived and I've worn them in the rain.

It turned out that while I was buying the boots, the SA had bought a space heater for the workshop. It's the effect of the rain, one's thoughts start turning to autumn.