Raindrops keep falling on ….

For the last week we have been planning to mow the lawn (if you can really call what we have in our back garden a lawn: more a patch of rough grass with a fair amount of moss to give it colour), to give it one last trim before autumn slides inexorably into winter. Every time we think there has been a long enough dry(ish) period so that the grass is actually fit to mow, lo and behold, it rains some more. I think we are fighting a losing battle. Maybe we should, as someone in the family suggested, get a goat or rent the garden out to a local farmer to put a few of his sheep in.

So, taking that weather pattern into account, it was very pleasant to wake up this morning and see blue sky and sunshine. It was exactly right for going off for a long walk through the back lanes, away from the traffic, admiring the autumn colours that are finally appearing in the trees. I think it’s just been too wet for the leaves to dry out and fade into reds and browns.

I like to check the weather forecasts for other places as well as here, places where I have been or where friends of mine live. It was with a certain element of schadenfreude that I discovered that Vigo has been having some rather nasty weather. I read reports in the Galician newspapers online about really bad storms over the weekend. It rather sounds as though the weather is following a similar pattern to last year when I remember getting soaked just walking down to the bus stop. Trees have been blown down and many of those convenient underground garages have been flooded. This evening I read that much of Galicia will be back in alerta naranja for bad rainstorms tomorrow.

I wouldn’t really wish that kind of misfortune on anyone but it really was quite gratifying to see table turned for once and the sun shining on Saddleworth, which can look very good when the sun shines, while the rain falls elsewhere. Maybe we’re finally having an Indian summer.

It’s a very odd thing. For years and years I can remember going back to work after the summer break, enrolling students onto AS and A Level courses on quite baking hot days and then teaching the first few weeks of term in sweltering classrooms, sometimes invaded by wasps which made students, male as well as female, squeal and scream. Since I retired from teaching there has been a complete change and September has been reliably soggy in the Manchester area. So it goes.

Someone who appears to have problems raining down on him at the moment is my young Spanish cycling hero, Alberto Contador. Three times winner of the Tour de France, he also won the 2008 Giro d’Italia and the 2008 Vuelta de España making him the 5th cycle racer in history and the first Spaniard ever to win all three BIG cycling road races. However he has been in the news because they say they have found traces of the drug clenbuterol in one of the samples he gave during the Tour de France this year. He could lose his title from the 2010 Tour, not to mention messing up future contracts. He would be a bit stupid to risk his rather successful career for some short term success. He is understandably a bit upset and swears he is innocent, claiming that the drug must have come from some dodgy meat he ate. Hmmmm!

It never rains but it pours!