Washing, weather and wondering who to blame!

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day assisting my daughter in a major tidy-up of her daughters' bedrooms. I came home with a party bag: a bag full of washing. We collected so much stuff for washing that my daughter's house and washing machine were about to be overwhelmed. And so I volunteered to bring a lot of it home with me and did two lots straight away. Onto the washing line to dry overnight it almost all went.

This morning early the last lot was pegged out and off I went for my run. Of course pegging out worked like a magic charm on the weather and by the time I returned it was starting to rain. And so the whole lot had to be unpegged and brought into the house to dry. The whole point of it coming here was because this is largely stuff that cannot go in the tumble-drier and I have more space for hanging stuff in the garden to dry.

But it seems that singlehandedly I have brought the drought to an end. For I am told that we have been having a drought. One of my early morning run acquaintances has been complaining that the soil is too dry to plant out leeks and the like. They need good, wet ground. And a keen gardening friend who has just returned from a few weeks away declares that her grass is beginning to turn brown. So a drought has been going on; even the weathermen say so.

Somehow I imagine a drought to bring along with it the sun burning down day after day from an empty, cloud-free sky: desert conditions and dominant colours blue (sky), yellow (sun) and a pale brown (all the dried up plants). Here drought has largely meant cloudy skies, apart from occasional brilliantly sunny days inbetween times: dominant colours grey and green. The only real signs of drought are the plants in pots in the garden which needed regular watering.


I have heard no mention of weather in the much talked about Labour Party manifesto. I say this only half jokingly. The peculiar weather patterns going on all over the place are almost certainly down to climate change, something that certain politicians don't even believe in!

In the meantime I have gone from shorts and t-shirt yesterday to wondering whether we need to put the heating back on now.

One of my Facebook friends put on a post about the death of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, and how her death could have been prevented if the queen had insisted that Diana have proper security after her divorce. If the queen had insisted that Diana keep her bodyguards all would have been well, supposedly.

Where do people find these things? There are masses of stories out there that people put out on social media. Do they spend hours trawling the internet for such stuff? Do they not have enough to do with their time? Are there not enough good books to read?

Anyway, let's get back to Diana. It seems there is going to be yet another documentary about it all. Or maybe there has already been such a documentary. The article began like this:

 "The world came to a halt on 31st August 1997, after Princess Diana sadly lost her life in a tragic accident at the age of 36."

It was that opening like that annoyed me to begin with. I really don't think the world came to a halt. Not for most of us. Certainly not for me. Very sad for her sons but it didn't have a direct effect on the rest of us. I remember my son calling upstairs with thenews he had just heard. I thought maybe she had committed suicide. After all, her life was very chaotic at the time. As the details came out, I thought from the start that her death must have been avoidable. But I never thought it had anything to do with her having insufficient security around her.

No, what struck me was that if Diana and her boyfriend had simply driven away quietly, ignoring the paparazzi, they could almost certainly have made it back to their hotel or wherever else they wanted to go.. It must have been a pain being followed around by photographers but eventually the photographers would have grown tired and moved on to somebody else. It's a bit like teasing: the more you react and respond, the more it continues. There was really no need to join in the exciting game of driving off at top speed with all the thrill of the chase. Surely the posh car had smoked glass in the windows to keep prying eyes out.

No, the whole thing was avoidable but I find myself feeling a little sorry for the queen if she is held responsible for the car crash. And, goodness knows, I don't often stand up for her majesty!

It's another extreme example of the media doing weird things to our view of the world!