Dressing for the weather!!!

This week has been crisp and cold, perfectly good weather for getting wrapped up and going out.

On Monday I was due to accompany the youngest grandchild to football training in the early evening. So I got ready for an expedition into the cold: tights under my trousers, two jumpers, thick socks and hiking boots. Add to that a warm coat, woolly hat, scarf, windproof gloves and I was all set to watch small boys slither all over a so-called “all-weather” pitch. All weather, my eye!! It was as icy as all get out and little boys were landing on their backsides but I was nice and warm.

This morning I was out bright and early to walk to the local station and catch a train to Manchester. It was another bright, cold day. En route I saw our postman – in shorts!!! OK, so he keeps on the move but, even so, this is really not shorts weather. The BT workmen down their hole looked frozen and the workmen repairing yet another collapsing dry stone wall appeared to have very cold hands. I wouldn’t fancy selecting stones to build a wall in this cold.

The culmination, though, was when I arrived at the station and noticed the man in sandals. He was perhaps getting on a bit but didn’t show any other signs of madness. However, there he was, wearing lightweight trousers, a shirt (just average, not a thick lumberjack style shirt) and jumper and OPEN TOE SANDALS. Yes, OPEN TOE SANDALS in February! In very un-British fashion he didn’t have socks on despite wearing sandals. Now, maybe he has a foot condition that demands that his toes are exposed to the air at all times but it really looked like a recipe for frostbite to me. Oh, and no gloves either! The rest of us were all muffled up: gloves, scarves, hats, boots!! But he just sat there as happy as Larry, twiddling his toes at the cold.

Then there were various girls around Manchester wearing the kind of thin leggings that are little more than tights. And the young men in short sleeved T-shorts displaying their tattoos. I’m trying not to get started on the low-slung trousers teamed up with short skimpy tops, exposing an expanse of blue-mottled flesh that I really didn’t want to see.

There’s snow on the hills for goodness sake!

Still, I didn’t let it put me off my nice lunch with friends at El Rincón de Rafa in Manchester, where we ate a selection of reasonable authentic tapas and polished off a bottle of red wine for under £15 per person.

Not at all bad for a cold Wednesday. And besides, it’s a lot colder in Italy at the moment: snowball fights in the Piazza del Campo in Sienna!! What next?