SOme thoughts on the state of the weather and the world!

Yesterday I went into Manchester early, on the bus at 8.30, just a little cross with myself for organising things so that for once I was having to pay for my transport around the area. I suppose you can't always get exactly what you want. Everything comes at a price and I wanted to be in the city centre before 10.00 am.

It was a beautiful morning: clear blue sky and sunshine. When I arrived at Oldham Mumps interchange, where I was catching the tram, once again grumpily paying for my transport, that part of town was shrouded in mist. The closer the tram got to Manchester the more mist there seemed to be around.this was a strange phenomenon. It is very rare for Saddleworth to have better weather than Oldham and Manchester. As a rule if it is fine and sunny in Manchester it will be fairly cloudy in Oldham and dull and gloomy in Saddleworth. Proximity to the Pennines does that for us.

By the time I came out if the hairdressers later in the morning the sun was shining nicely over Manchester as well. The fine weather continued for the rest of the day all over the region. I was almost convinced that we were having an Indian summer after all. The weatherman soon dashed my hopes. .promising rain coming in the most places today.

But today dawned fine and dry, if rather dull. So I ran round the village as I often do, coming across my old friend Jack and his little dog Rosie, neither of whole I have seen since May. I have been on the lookout for him since I returned form Spain. I was concerned that something might have happened to the little dog. She is, as Jack reminded me, 17 years old, a good age for a small dog. "She doesn't look, does she?" he commented. "Indeed not", I assured him, "she's very sprightly". "But then", he continued, "you wouldn't think I was almost 81, although I don't think you could say I was sprightly". Such harsh realism. I went on my way, leaving him to make his unsprightly way back to his car and then home for coffee and crumpets. I was glad to see them both still around!

Later I walked to Uppermill. The weather continued dull and cloudy but dry. Various acquaintances I met en route commented in the weather. We all declared ourselves fortunate that we are not suffering hurricanes and earthquakes as in parts of the world blessed, or perhaps cursed, with more extreme weather. Do we really have the right to moan about the lack of an Indian summer.

What with hurricanes and earthquakes, if we were a primitive people we could be forgiven for thinking that the gods were angry with us. But we are not a primitive people and instead of those angry gods we have angry politicians, possibly godlike figures we have elected, blustering and threatening to destroy countries. It's a rather frightening world we live in at the moment and we just have to make the best of things. We need to keep telling ourselves, Candide-like that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps we can convince ourselves. But Stephen Hawking says we have to colonise a new planet if we are to survive. So it goes!