Stormy weather. Pretending to commute. Rebuilding Notre Dame de Paris.

Well, it was a wild, wet and windy night last night, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to find the rain had stopped earlier this morning and I was able to run in just the wild and windy bit of the weather. The sun even came out for a while and even felt warm in spots out of the wind. One of my nodding acquaintances, out walking her dog, told me she had almost been blown over up at the top of the hill. 

 

The river was bouncing along.

 

 

This was going on all over the place. A friend complained of storms over towards Stockport and  my granddaughter sent a picture of the canal looking ready to overflow in Tameside. 

Towards the end of the morning the torrential rain returned, with hailstones mixed in! The sun keeps trying to reappear so maybe we can manage a walk later. Crazy weather!

I was reading about ‘faux commuting’. Many people have really enjoyed being able to fall out of bed minutes before they start work and having no further to go than from the bedroom to whichever bit of the house serves as an office. Jokes abound about people only really dressing from waist up for Zoom meetings. Do people really do that? 

But it seems that some people have been missing their daily commute. One said she had not realised how much subconscious planning for her day went on during her morning drive to work until suddenly it wasn’t happening. So now she gets up and drives 20 minutes to a take-out coffee place and then home again to start work. 

 

It’s not just in this country. An attorney in Washington DC replaced his regular 15 mile cycle -ride to work with a one-hour circular ride round a local beauty spot. “It’s an hour where I don’t really need to talk to anybody, I’m just sort of away,” he says. 

Even my son has been doing this, getting up and walking to the railway station and back before he starts work in the morning and then taking a walk at the end of his day. People in the know recommend this sort of demarcation tactic. It helps you sleep better, they say.  

Now, it seems a long time since Notre Dame in Paris caught fire. So much has happened to turn our world upside down since then. But in fact it’s not quite two years ago, April 2019. Now, taking a break from reading about contagion rates and vaccine programmes, I read that steps are underway to do some rebuilding. Suggestions that the old spire should be replaced by something modern were rejected and President Macron swore it would be rebuilt within five years. He didn’t know we’d have a pandemic to deal with when he said that. Anyway, they’ve recently been cutting special oak trees of the right size. 

Some 1,000 oaks in more than 200 French forests, both private and public, were chosen to make the frame of the original cathedral transept and spire. So now the tree surgeons are busy in the Forest of Bercé that once belonged to kings of France. They need to do it now before new sap starts to rise and then they have to let the trunks dry out before they can be used. Goodness! It’s going to be hard to meet the President’s  deadline! But it will be good eventually to see the cathedral restored. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!