On the rain again

Yesterday’s column about Dyslexia and art received a few great comments, of which my favourite was “would a dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac lie awake at night and worry about whether there was a dog?”. I promised I would nick it and so I have.

Yesterday morning I was up at the crack of sparrows fart, ensuring that all my work for Currencies Direct was completed before play started in the third cricket Test between England and the West Indies at 11.30 French time. I had prepared my Pimms and cucumber sandwiches so as to be able fully to enjoy a quintessentially English summer day, a feature no doubt of the drought we have all heard so much about. Imagine my surprise then that when I put the TV on I saw that rain had stopped play starting. In fact the whole day was abandoned without a ball being bowled. At last the drought must be over. All day we were receiving calls and pictures of the weather in the UK. My picture today was to have been of that nice lady decorator on the phone commiserating with some poor wet soul back in England whilst drinking a glass of wine by the pool, but she saw it and the veto was applied. I do hope they could not hear her glugging that chilled Chablis, so instead I give you a photo sent by Slash and Burn Thornton Allan from the M1 in England yesterday.

Looks like a study in oils or water colours?

My attention was drawn to an article in the Daily Telegraph which reported a story about  two international communities that are making a strategic alliance, or twinning as we call it. Dull, a village in Scotland is tying the knot with Boring, a small community in Oregan. This got me thinking of suitable towns to twin with the charming Swiss town of Wankdorf. The best I could do is suggest the up market hamlet called Happy in Texas. Happy and Wankdorf, a match made in heaven and the perfect antidote to Dull and Boring. I shall be watching the comments section of this column today to see if any of you have any other ideas for towns or villages twinning.

So last night the incomprehensible Scotsman eventually arrived from the airport. The twenty-minute drive took him an hour. He was apparently cursing the fact that all the locals were driving on the wrong side of the road the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car. At least this is what I heard when I got the translation later.  I do not understand more than a tenth of what he says, it was like watching tennis as that nice lady decorator, who understands the lingo, and the incomprehensible Scotsman traded stories. We adjourned to Valbonne Square under a slight chill. Although still in shorts, I did take a light sweater in case it cooled too much by midnight. If you are living in England, why not rent my house in summer? Bring sun tan cream.

A late pizza in the square was followed by an adjournment to the pav to enable the incomprehensible Scotsman to drink back dinner, which that nice lady decorator had forced him to buy. I left them to it. “Drinking back” is a Scottish concept, where the buyer of dinner attempts to secure effective repayment for the cost of dinner by drinking their own body weight in wine. From what I saw, and the number of bottles littering the pav this morning, in typical Scots fashion, he got his money’s worth.

Chris France