Don't Know Why, There's Some Sun Up In The Sky, Lovely Weather

Time for my annual moan about atmospheric conditions that have happened with clockwork precision every 12 months for the last 28 stinkin' years of my life, but which I still react to with surprised indignation, like a walrus being slapped by the fin of an insolent guppy. Yes: according to all the sources, it's gonna start (continue) raining (being sunny) men (no men are involved).

I am not suited to this weather. I am supposedly descended from good, solid Italian womenfolk, but if I merely glance at the sun I crisp up like some kind of Celtic porcine demon. I dislike the feeling of being so hot that you cannot undress any further, so you wish to rip your flesh away in great steaming chunks and plunge your skeleton into liquid nitrogen. And it alarms me when we're trapped under the oppressive reign of the heatwave; it's unnatural, like the Earth has suddenly spun off its axis and everyone is just lolling about in parks while we're hurtling towards the centre of the sun and ONLY I HAVE NOTICED. It does seem like the zealous, chipper little tykes at the Met Office share my overhyped sense of panic, which pleases me greatly. Not a weather forecast has gone by in recent days where they haven't been looking imploringly out at me, with their puppy-dog eyes, wiping their nose down their sleeve, and beseeching that I check on the nice old lady next door lest she dies! That's right, dies! In the heat! The heat can make you die! Quite why I'm painting the weather forecasters of this fair isle as satanic children, I don't know. Must be the heat. Tee, and indeed, hee.

That's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the feet. Oh, the feet! Feet are, by absolutely the furthest margin ever, THE most unattractive part of any human anatomy, and suddenly they are everywhere. I once knew a guy at university who had really freakishly long toes, making him look like he was walking around on a pair of Beadle's teeny hands. I'm expecting the long, piercing scream I emitted on first spying them to bounce off Saturn and reflect back into my ears at some point in the near future - probably when I'm sitting on a river bank, maybe watching the evening sun speckle prettily off a duck's bill, and suddenly I will be assailed by an unearthly shriek that will shatter my peace and tip my brain into merry insanity. And what will I see around me as I stagger through the streets drowning in a hell of my own creation? Feet! Everywhere, the feet! There's a guy, looks perfectly normal, t-shirt, jeans, nothing wrong with that, and then OMG flip-flops! Why would you voluntarily wear footwear that is so very uncomfortable? It is the shoe equivalent of a t-shirt that you wear by clothes-pegging it to your armpits.

I am forever summer-doomed. Doomed to be the only one who sees the sense, sweating in my trainers, scuttling from air-conditioned building to shade of tree to hiding under my bed. Until I move to...Canada! Canada! Canada! (It's only a model.)

Update: because it takes me so gosh darn long to write these things, as if they're the fucking Gettysberg Address or something, the sunny weather of last week has been washed away on a flood of...well, floods, and the sky has chucked enough water on the planet to fill, say, a Nissan Micra with its sunroof left open by a forgetful and heat-addled simpleton. Needless to say, after all of that whinging, I have a quite poetic cold now. Bovril!

It May Wean Me From My Pickle Vinegar-Drinking Habit

Sometimes great and fantastic stuff can come from deep and prolonged misery. But you know what? I think I may have recently discovered the best and most brilliant example of this phenomena. "Dulce et Decorum Est"? Forget about it. Pretty pictures of sunflowers torn from interminable mental anguish, much like an earlobe is torn from a crazy head? Mere Crayola scribblings. The beautiful, lyrical melancholy of sacred cow around this parish, Mr Guy Garvey Out Of Elbow? OK, you may have got me on that one. But let's say my discovery is almost up there. Sing it long and sing it loud: Happiness, thy name is Bovril.

Let me start at the top. I have a cold. I am safely assuming that I am not alone in the feeling that every time I have a cold, I redefine the phrase "deep and prolonged misery", as each time I recover, I somehow manage to forget just how annoying having a cold is. Especially if it's not quite bad enough to silence the aggravating, earnest corner of the brain which is just obsessed with getting out of a cosy bed and going into ridiculous work. And doubly especially when there is a sore throat involved. Did you know the average human swallows 2,000 times a day? Nothing like a searing slice of pain whipping across your neck twice a minute to remind you of that juicy little statistic. Anyhow. "Hot beverage!" my white blood cells were crying. "Bring us a hot beverage, so that we have the energy to continue fighting our good fight!" What a quandary - can't have tea or coffee, cos I don't want the dairy to clog up the pipework, can't have hot 'bina, cos I'm not 5. Suddenly a burst of feverish inspiration!

Oh, Bovril. You came and you gave without taking. The perfect drink. It's hot, it's nutritious, it's more delicious than a mug full of liquid has any right to be. It's like drinking gravy, for God's sake, but gravy that you're allowed to drink without people throwing you out of their establishments. I can't believe more people don't drink this all the time. True, I've got through a jar in two days, and as the sodium makes itself known in my system I can actually hear my arteries fuzzing up. That, and I'm so dehydrated that I'm not so much "going to the toilet" as "huffing talcum powder out of my body". Plus, it's done absolutely stone-cold nothing to affect my cold, apart from give it a delightful meaty hue.

But still, I feel like I have discovered a whole new colourful prism of experience. A brave new world where the horrendous suffering of the winter sniffles can inspire the revelation that beef can sooth a hurty throat. And bring into being a post so solipsistic that even hardened bloggers would cock a snook at it. Truly, friends, it is a wonderful world.