Soupy air rarely brings anything good. I was worried yesterday about the blanket yellow warnings for extreme rain and thunderstorms covering East Anglia and the Greater London area, since I was supposed to be going to London today, and when I woke to roars of thunder and the hammering of torrential rain on the roof it did not bode well. Yesterday the Systems Administrator, who was planning to go to Lords today for an evening of T20, brushed aside my visions of short circuited signals, flooded underpasses and overhead wires knocked out by lightning, saying it would not be that bad. This morning it sounded as though it probably was, and when I got downstairs and looked at my emails there was one from my prospective companion in art to say that Abellio Greater Anglia's departure board was a sea of red and they were asking people not to travel unless absolutely necessary.
We postponed our trip, and the SA cried off the T20, since there was nothing else to be done, and were then left with an unexpected day at home. At least it meant we were both here to preside over the cats. The cool kitten has had a growth spurt, and yesterday evening his pursuit of Our Ginger around the house looked less like adoration and more like incipient bullying. Things will change in July when he and his brothers make what we hope will be their final visit to the vet for now, to be castrated, but that still leaves us with nearly two weeks of surging testosterone to get through. Being stuck at home also meant the SA was here to look at the controls of my shower, which suddenly failed this morning.
Our Ginger must have decided in the night that he was man and not mouse, because today he held his ground with the kittens instead of demanding to be let out each time they sniffed him too enthusiastically. By lunchtime the cool kitten had become markedly more respectful, and we think that at some point when we weren't around Our Ginger must have thumped him hard or else snarled at him in a genuinely menacing fashion. At any rate, Our Ginger sat surrounded by kittens, swishing his magnetic tail like anything and daring them to touch it, and they didn't dare, following which he curled up on his favourite pouffe and slept on it undisturbed until teatime.
There was good news on the shower front as well. As I tried to turn the water off this morning the knob passed the usual Off position without resistance, while the flow of water didn't reduce at all. Panic stricken I continued to turn the knob, while trying not to force anything in case it broke, and after a couple of minutes the stream reduced to a trickle, then finally stopped. I managed to wait until the Systems Administrator was half way through breakfast before mentioning the problem with the shower, instead of waking him up to tell him. Later on the SA showed me how to switch off the pump and which valves to turn in the airing cupboard, and when the SA investigated the control knob the problem was due to the valve being gunked up and nothing was actually broken. Phew, that's a plumber's bill successfully averted.
And we voted, which we'd have done anyway before going to London, if we'd gone, and in the afternoon I made scones and we had a cream tea. Scones are really not difficult, and I bought some clotted cream when I was shopping for ice cream ingredients. The Systems Administrator was rather irritated that the forecast for tonight has steadily improved since this morning, and it might have been possible to go to the T20 after all, but that's not the way to look at it. Once you've made the best decision you can given the information available at the point when you have to decide then that's it. There's no point in jobbing backwards, as they used to say in the stock market. The air is still like soup, so I hope it clears overnight in the absence of more thunderstorms.
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