The sunshine is wonderful.
The world is green and lovely and filled with clouds of drooping blossom. As I drove the children back to school the scent from the fields of rapeseed was so gorgeously overwhelming that I suddenly saw, for the first time ever, why Dorothy might have been overcome by the perfume of a meadow full of flowers. I could have easily just closed my eyes and drifted into sleep, it was as if the warm air had thickened and become drowsily intoxicating.
Obviously I didn’t, because I was driving, and didn’t have a tin man, or it might have been a scarecrow, I forget, to rescue me. Since I didn’t have either I ploughed on and took the children back to school.
Oliver does not do climate change easily, and had insisted on wearing his thermal vest, because he always does. Once we got to school he was so hot that even he agreed that perhaps he ought to remove it. He also had to change his trousers, which I had pointed out had got somebody else’s name sewn in the waistband, and also did not fit him terribly well.
Once he had replaced his shirt without the woollen vest, and also been persuaded to abandon the woollen jersey, he came to wave goodbye to us, complaining all the while about feeling under-dressed and exposed. He would have done well in the British Army in the days of the Raj, who also refused to make any concessions to the peculiarities of the weather.
It is so unusually warm that people are indeed starting to behave differently. Mark has put his shorts on, and Big John, who is one of the taxi drivers, has had his hair cut so short that it is almost shaved. He explained that he has not noticed his hair over the winter, until it became so warm yesterday that he was obliged to remove his woolly bobble hat. At this point he realised that his hair had grown several inches over the last few months, and was curling over his shoulders. He made a reluctant visit to the barber, and told us that his ears had been the bit which had taken longest. He has kept his enormous beard, because he needs one to ride his Harley Davidson motorcycle.
I have taken off my fur-lined boots. The dogs have stopped lying blissfully in the sun and have started lying blissfully out of the sun. I think perhaps we have become a bit short of Vitamin D, because despite our best efforts at exposing bits of us to the sunlight at every opportunity, neither Mark nor I have changed colour in the least, we are not even pink.
I em enjoying it very much. It is lovely to see everybody relaxed and happy. A couple were dancing companionably together across the street from the taxi rank this evening, swaying and twisting in the evening sunshine. It is a beautiful world when the sun shines.
The holiday is almost over, which I must confess will be a relief now. I have got to the point where I have had enough of intoxicated sunburned people. I will be glad when the roads are a bit clearer, and the cash machines have been refilled, and the petrol station has had a delivery, and the Co-op has got bread for sale again. It has been very splendid to have a holiday, but it is over now, and I am not sorry.
It has been jolly hard work.
