Rants about weather. Significant birthdays. Music.

It was fine and sunny when I went out running this morning. My garden looked quite nice in the sunshine, not yet up to its full wild glory but coming on nicely. Not long after I got back I took a look at Facebook and found my Italian friend having a bit of a rant about English weather: basically “It’s nice and warm and sunny in my garden now but rainstorms are forecast for 11 o’ clock. How can we stand it? I’ll post more at 11.00”. All this in italian of course.

I’ve just checked, and yes, she has posted a further video of the rain in her garden. That was at about midday, I suppose. The rain had not yet arrived here, which is surprising as we are rather closer to the Pennines and usually have worse weather than South Manchester. So it goes!

I must say I am always impressed by her ability to do lengthy “live” posts, which are usually amusing. Some people are just good at IT and social media!

And her rant just shows the advantages of getting up and about early in the morning - often the best part of the day. 

Today is Bob Dylan’s birthday, his 80th birthday. There have been interesting radio programmes about his career in music. Here’s a link to various famous people saying which are their favourite Dylan songs. Interesting tales. It’s a shame his voice got lost somewhere along the way. It’s also rather a shame I never got to see him live before his voice disappeared. 

Yesterday we had the family round for a meal, which was very pleasant. At some point in the afternoon our 18 year old granddaughter asked, “What is Grandad listening to? That doesn’t sound like his stuff.” Grandad was in the study working away at a translation and incidentally listening to this Youtube clip of Prince, Tom Petty, Dhani Harrison and others playing “While my  guitar gently weeps”. 

So we made her listen to it properly. She was only moderately impressed. I’m still not sure what she expected her grandfather to be listening to. Her older sister would almost certainly have recognised the recording and not been at all surprised to find her grandfather listening to it. Somehow we have instilled a love of “our” music in the older granddaughter - she knows the words to any amount of Simon and Garfunkel songs  and has Joni Mitchell in her list of favourite singers - which we haven’t managed to do in her younger sister. Odd!

On the BBC radio news they continue to go on and on about the Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana. It’s beginning to look a little as though the BBC does protest too much. Are they desperately trying to prove their loyalty to the royal family in this strange way.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!