A week away from midsummer and I think I’m going to have to light the stove. Cold, wet and miserable.
And I now have a headache.
Worse, the cricket world cup is proving to be a huge embarrassment, as game after game gets washed out. Today it was India v NZ.
The stupid thing is, it actually doesn’t rain that much in England, not nearly as much as people say. Ever since I started wandering about in London photoing photos, I have paid very careful attention to the weather, and I absolutely know this. The weather isn’t always that great, but actual rain, falling out of the sky, continuously, is quite rare, percentage-wise. It very seldom rains as much as it has been raining for the last few days. Whenever I go out, I carry a small portable umbrella in my bag, in a special compartment. Almost always, that is where it stays. Like I say, it very seldom rains. But, sometimes it does, and when it does, we all notice because it’s so damn unpleasant.
But part of the reason it’s so damn unpleasant is that it rains quite rarely, so we aren’t organised to deal with it, the way they are in countries where they have an actual rainy season.
The title of this posting sounds sarcastic, but no sarcasm was intended. The Bishop’s tweet, quoted above, actually made me feel better. I had been feeling cold, but I didn’t believe how I felt. This is June. It can’t be this cold. I must be imagining it. (To be exact, my feet had to be imagining it.) But now I know that it isn’t just me.
Sounds kind of like Oregon. It rains six to nine months a year here, but it we seldom get actual rain. It just kind of drizzles continually. It’s sunny and warm right now, but the first year we moved here it didn’t stop raining until the first of July.
Actually no. It rains far less than that, at any rate here in the south of England. (I can’t speak for the north of England, or Wales or Scotland.) Usually, here in London, it is dry. Occasionally, it is wet. Even more occasionally, it is very wet, as it has been this week. But this wet is still not properly, continuously wet. It is merely wet like it is when it’s wet in Oregon. Even this week, the amount of actual honest-to-God rain, when you get properly soaked if you are minus a brolly, has been quite small.
But “small” is enough to wash out a game of cricket. Maybe it is cricket commentaries that make everyone think it constantly rains in England. But a lot of the time lost to rain in cricket is spent waiting for the pitch to dry, not merely waiting for the rain to stop. And that drying time has now decreased quite a lot, because English cricket pitches now tend to have better drainage, and almost as soon as the rain stops they can then get back out there.
I’m in Sweden right now, and yesterday evening I attended a barbecue in the home of some friends in Gothenburg. The rain kept coming and going, and we kept going outside and coming back inside as it kept coming and going. There was much joking about how this is a Swedish tradition. The weather here is very like in England.
As for the World Cup, despite the fact that four or five games have been washed out and we are less than half way through the group stage, it seems 95% certain that the semi-finalists will be England, India, New Zealand, and Australia – who were incidentally first, second, third, and fifth in the world rankings going into the tournament. Despite the washouts, the games played seem to have performed the function of the group stage already and the rest if it feels like a waste of time. The cricket World Cup has tried many formats, and all of the recent ones – since about 1990 – have been much too long. That’s about money for TV rights.