the dog days of summer

The phone rang mid afternoon and I picked it up hoping it would be the delivery driver with my two sheets of clear acrylic for mending the greenhouse roof.  Ordered on 11 August, delivery normally between four and nine working days, I rang on Monday to enquire as to progress and was told they should be with me on Wednesday.  That was yesterday so I rang again this morning and was told they were with the courier, she would find out more and ring me back.  Nobody did and the plastic still hasn't arrived.

It was not white van man on the phone but the Systems Administrator, back at Great Bentley station and wanting to know if we needed any milk.  The SA had gone to the Clacton airshow, but as fog rolled in from the sea and the Tornado performed behind a sheet of low cloud while the Gunfleet wind farm slowly disappeared from view, the SA took a view that there wasn't going to be much of a display that afternoon, and grabbed the one train an hour while the going was good.  With its modern equipment the Tornado is fully up to charging around in thick cloud, but the vintage aircraft aren't, and anyway there's not a lot of point if nobody on the ground can see what they're doing.  The wind was coming in off the sea so all the people lining the seafront were frustratingly bathed in brilliant sunlight as the fog burned off over the land, but out over the water it was a different story.

It is a shame for the organisers and everybody who went, especially those who had travelled from a distance.  The SA hadn't, and parking is free at Great Bentley, so apart from the disappointment of not seeing the planes it was not such a great loss for the SA as for some other people.  Maybe it will be clearer tomorrow.  Maybe it won't be.  Today's weather is not what was forecast twenty-four hours ago.

I cannot fathom why people voluntarily go on holiday to places where they expect it to be as hot as it is this week in north Essex.  I don't understand why the weather forecasters on the radio and TV present each searing new day as a delight.  Somebody on the Today programme this morning was sniffy about Norwich where the temperature might be twenty-two degrees today.  Twenty-two degrees sounds lovely to me.  As it is I am hot, sticky, tired, and have had a raging headache for the past forty-eight hours.  I know it is a very British thing to moan as soon as it gets even moderately hot, but nowadays I can't shake off the feeling that the last week of August is something to be got through, before the sanity of September when it all starts cooling down and I can get on with stuff.