MargoMusing

As an English person I am, of course, accustomed to talking about the weather, and am also familiar with the fact that people who live in places which have real extremes of weather mock us for thinking we have extreme weather...

But this week was pretty exciting . ..

We've had some very wild and windy weather.

Storm Imogen hit the UK, and while we weren't in the worst hit areas, we were forecast to have winds gusting at up to 62 mph, and while I don't have a weather station on my roof so can't be sure, I suspect we got them - it was certainly very wild and noisy,and there were a lot of floods, although fortunately none which directly affected me, although a couple of colleagues had to make detours around fallen trees and blocked roads.

Things have calmed down a little now, but it's still breezy and wet. Although we have had one very bright and frosty morning

I've had something of a stressful week, despite it having been so short (there was a bank holiday on Monday) and stress did the stuff it always does, and left me not sleeping well, and feeling nauseous, which is no fun whatsoever. And the knowledge that things are (almost) never as bad as you expect really doesn't help.

Anyway, for various reasons I was very much looking forward to the week being over. On Friday I was in court all day. It was a not-too-difficult day for me, as I had counsel, but a long day in a stuffy court room is rarely much fun, especially when timing leads to a certain emptiness, at the point in the day where one usually finds lunch...

However, after we had finished, it was suggested that we go for a drink, as one of our number was celebrating a birthday, and besides, I was told, "it's fizzy Friday" (one per week!) so i found myself, at around 5.30, sitting out under a large parasol, sipping chilled prosecco and fraternising with my erstwhile opponents. I’m not in the habit of drinking champagne or prosecco at 5.30 in the afternoon, even on a Friday, but I have to say it is the kind of thing one could become accustomed to, fairly easily…!

Of course, one of the disadvantages of slurping fizz at 5.30 is that you then have to find something else to do afterwards, while you wait for the fizz to wear off in order to drive home. Happily, another local lawyer was holding a party to celebrate 20 years in practice, so we went to congratulate her, and socialise for a while. Not at all what I had planned for my Friday evening, but definitely a pleasant end to the week. And when I got home, it was to find an unexpected free box of chocolates on the doorstep, which I think we can all agree is the type of thing which improves any day no end! (The chocolates are a somewhat belated apology from the chocolate company, for having inserted a big chunk of plastic sheeting into a chocolate I had at Christmas)

So not a bad day, all in all.

And then, it started to rain. It hasn’t rained for several weeks, and everything smelled of freshness and wet earth and spring, and a new start.

Today has been a quiet day – I woke up to the news that the referendum, on AV has resulted in a ‘No’ vote, which does not surprise me, but which does disappoint me. Other than that,  I have done dull things, such as laundry and hoovering the floors, and topping up the oil in the car, and taking cardboard and plastic to the recycling place. I have also been to the garden centre to buy various seedlings – tomatoes, beans and so on, as, as usual, I have either been too late to plant seeds or have planted them and seen them develop into healthy slug-food. I am hoping that the plants I have now bought will prove too large to be easily eaten by slugs, even the Super-Slugs which seem to inhabit my garden. I haven’t planted them yet, as I got side-tracked by weeding, and it then started to rain, but hopefully tomorrow will be fine for long enough to do so.

The day ended, happily, with Doctor Who and Pirates, and a little sneak preview of Mr Gaiman’s episode, which airs next week. I have to say that this week’s episode, while it had its moments, will not, I think, go down as one of the great episodes. It was fun, but not deep.