Stormy Weather II

[BBMmk2]

Happy to report idyllic sunshine with a gentle prairie wind stirring the foliage...temperature just perfect.

Where am I? Visiting youngest in Iowa City.

Wow! Sounds great!

Not too bad here yesterday. I have now a mobility scooter to get around in! So much easier for me and MrsBBM. Went to Sheffield Park Gardens yesterday. A bit of a chill, yesterday though, but a good time was had!

[Serial_Apologist]

Thunder, lightning and heavy rain here while having my lunch. More to come too by the looks of it out to the west: some great cumulus cauliflours with very dark undersides and flat anvil tops! Seems likely to stay on the coolish side for the next week or so.

[DracoM]

Terrific day oop 'ere, clouds being herded ragged, huge sun, brisk, invigorating wind.

[BBMmk2]

Sunny intervals have been forecast today. I hope so!

[Petrushka]

A reasonable day here today, feeling pleasantly warm in the sunshine, though nowhere near the standard expected for August. The week looks dire with daytime temperatures on Tuesday sinking to a max of 14 degrees. Looking forward up to the 15th the weather looks very poor for this time of year.

Any sign of anything better, SA? Feeling the same desperation for some good summer weather that seems the norm now.

[Serial_Apologist]

A reasonable day here today, feeling pleasantly warm in the sunshine, though nowhere near the standard expected for August. The week looks dire with daytime temperatures on Tuesday sinking to a max of 14 degrees. Looking forward up to the 15th the weather looks very poor for this time of year.

Any sign of anything better, SA? Feeling the same desperation for some good summer weather that seems the norm now.

Indeed Bbm - coldest night since June 9th here (9 degs C) making it a hard climb today to reach the early August average maximum - at 20 C still a couple of degrees below. I think best to wait until after Thursday to see what chances there are of warmer and more settled weather coming our way - with the kidz on their 'olls I wish I could be more optimistic!

At least it's sunny - just right for this afternoon's guided history walk around the Kinght's Hill district of Herne Hill - or Hernia Hill as I've rechristened it from my experiences of having to cycle up it whenever I pay visits to Kings Hospital!

[DracoM]

Rain coming in off the Irish Sea, veiling the fells, soaking tourists.
What the hell is happening to our summer?

[cloughie]

An OK day here with chores of gardening and car washing, it'll probably rain dreckly.

[Lat-Literal]

Much as I would love to say that I am watching the Charity Shield match - I see my least favourite Chelsea player being connected to my ex senior school has scored - I have actually just got back from a two hour historical walk of the airfield with its "Friends" which sort of dovetailed in with a RAFA open day. The weather was kindly. Everyone was very pleasant although the chemistry wasn't wholly right. Very stereotypically in line with my local assumptions. And then suddenly we were joined by what I can only describe as a tough-as-old-boots-in-presentation early 60-something woman who rather gatecrashed it and completely took over with an intelligent line of questioning. To be frank, I assumed she was ex-army.

Much whispering at the sides about her audacity - overly harsh - then of course it was she and I who got talking at the club afterwards. It's that difference between the tough and the harder nosed but then I have instinctively known it for a long time. Did she have emotional depth and sensitivity as well as a lot of very interesting things to say? Yes she did. Spoke movingly about the death of her father in 2005. Ex-secretarial as it happens but should have been a researcher. Hoping to meet her again there in a fortnight - that is now the plan.

[DracoM]

By 3.30 p.m., it's 12C, the fells whited out, non-stop drenching fine rain as any who know the northern fells will know gets in everywhere, driven by a sneaping westerly.

This is HORRIBLE.

5.45 p.m. EVEN worse. Crikey - where is our summer going? Southern Europe in 40C, and here I am 600 miles or so north and shivering, in winter gear, watching a local river dangerously near flooding, and the roads awash in temps of way below 15C.

[Petrushka]

Tuesday looks like being a truly terrible day up here. The BBC forecast is giving out heavy rain all day with a temperature of no higher than 13 degrees. This is really getting people down: summer after summer ruined and the only thing to look forward to is yet another long winter.

[BBMmk2]

Rather cloudy today. Yesterday was marvellous!

[Lat-Literal]

A gloomy day here weather wise with a lot of whethery thoughts. I have booked and paid for four nights in Suffolk. Very cheap place by today's extortionate standards. My instinct is that it is 75% I won't go but we''ll see. If not, I will put it down to further life experience. During this period, I have found that many of the instincts have changed. There is more assessment of all the potential blocks. I've known for a long time that Greater London in itself is a block - the travelling into it, let alone across it - and also the ages of my parents. Each sits in the mind rather than being accurately external although there are many aspects of their actuality that placed them there. Simultaneously, there has been a throwing caution to the winds in a very practical sense. A pay now and worry about it later. That reflects my own condition which is more physically than emotionally concerning. It was the opposite in my past. One also finds that time is taken to find precisely the right word to express feelings. Earlier, it was good enough for the language and hence the comprehension simply to be there or thereabouts. There is no doubt that the key word in the last few weeks has been "bewilderment". Over time, this has been seen as a contrast with "being in awe" which was with me for a very long time for better and for worse. The trendy "awesome" never quite did it. Far too glib. When you put it out of your mind that 25 December is nearly here, Christmas when it comes seems so much richer but anything not at all like Christmas and approached in a similar way is unusually jarring to the nervous system and even akin to a horror show.

There is stuff about reach here.

That has to be true when one spends the early hours contemplating whether Tynemouth could conceivably be seen in a day trip and Holy Island likewise. The latter has ceased to be a place of some aspiring and is now becoming a sore. Will I ever get there? At the same time, I realise that if I do it will not be quite what I always felt it would be - the merging of the top part of my brain on the right hand side with the sea and Cuthbert - a hermit - while feeling somehow joined by Hull and Jackson and co in a rendition of "Warm Feeling". No, it will be a place which has its own appearance and its own atmosphere as long as it is possible to block out the routine tourists in the scene. Nothing against them but they simply do what I would do in real life movement - struggle to get there, enjoy and then ultimately go home for their tea. Whether it is better never to go there I don't know. That may well be decided for me. Well, not for me exactly but about me. One can only be what others decide, however much they may be wrong, and if most people never get that point that is hardly my business.

In the meantime, East Anglia is playing some wicked tricks on me. In my head, it is just above the right ear so I'm not at all surprised by these developments. It has taken an awfully long time to get me right 'ere. The principal matter was about somehow incorporating in a short space of time my mother's connections with Canewdon in Essex as previously mentioned and the North Norfolk of LP Hartley. "The Shrimp and the Anemone" and "The Go-Between". The two points could hardly be farther apart in that region while the focus was essentially on Southwold and Aldeburgh because they have to be done according to the guidebooks. The guidebooks, though, never travel by train. Additionally, there was or is Gillingham, briefly home of my favourite uncle who was also my godfather. I have really wanted to see where the man who took me rowing and on country walks to permit some sense of adventure I would otherwise never have had found his own heaven on retirement. Out of the Walworth Road forever to chuckle with rural locals, grow vegetables in fields rather than in a small concrete yard and angle in riverboats before his divorce at 82. But now there is another thing. It wasn't simply that I and my mother and he my mother's brother all had a darkness of appearance never fully explained. It was that all three of us and their father were or are for Londoners so rural leaning it beggars belief. The professional genealogists are doing a wonderful job but until Friday had proved predictably disappointing. Yes, we are London through and through. Except we are not as it now transpires because their father's family was from East Bergholt at the same time as John Constable and the Hay Wain. It isn't blacknuss - that would be my grandmother's and we're still working on that one feverishly - but it might as well be and I'm thrilled. The only problem is that I've now got to try to get to there too and to the parish records office in Ipswich. I doubt I can do it. It's probably just all talk.

I do believe that people are subconsciously drawn towards whatever is in their genes. Charlie was drawn to Anglia not knowing fully why. In the 1980s, all the venues in Greater London where I saw the Pogues. How could I have known beforehand that my Mum had been to them all decades earlier for ceilidhs without having in her body an Irish bone? Beyond reach, there is that thing called overview. People who are born to manage appear to have it at a very young age. They walk into an office and rather than wondering if they will fit in there automatically decide to make it an extension of their homes. Elsewhere, GPs acquire it in respect of the body itself and lawyers do much the same in respect of the body of the law. We mere mortals tend to adapt. "What would you like us to do now?" We may do it well while communicating with others in a more personal way as we see it but not being guarded we speak openly about being at Primal Scream the previous night, great as it happens on "Higher Than The Sun". Ah, they think, not that we know it at the time, he's more for the head than for the grab and with a mindset based only in ascending. Reinforce stasis. As for the general public after 2000, I saw them as either people like my Mum and Dad or else those from whom I would wish to run back to my Mum and Dad. Actually, it had always been that way. But it was the era when more questions were asked of me. "OK, so you are in Westminster and you say you brief Ministers but what do you actually do?" It made one feel yet again how Heaney experienced "Digging". "I suppose you could call it planning" I'd say, and only when I said it did that become apparent to me and also in that process what had been forced as some sort of overview. Oh my God. That's so loose compared with writing.

[Lat-Literal]

When I went up in the glider last week, I was only able to do so by paying first and then totally blocking out any idea of what it would be like. In mid-air I said to the pilot that I had been thinking wholly of the experience of flight and hadn't even begun to consider what could be seen of the terrain. The latter part was true but in the former I lied. I am impractical. I hadn't thought of anything about what it would be like to be in such a vehicle or to recognize its controls. It was all washed away in apprehension and a this-is-not-really-going-happen. I could only approach it blind. Except that there were highly emotional and conceptual references. Are emotions and concepts generally very closely linked in that way? I don't know and maybe it doesn't matter but I always feel that concepts aren't by definition meant to be emotional. That isn't the case with me. Yes, there is the concept of reach and the concept of view in anyone and there is also in me increasingly the concept of over. But there is also the concept of height and perhaps that is where it all became a little difficult. I know why I did it. The days aged four when being with my father beside his bonfire on our garden hill just below the woodland. That looking up to the gliders in 1967 or 1968. Did we wave? I think we might have done and assumed some waving back. The moon, a little later, gazing with my mother just as she and I did whenever seeing the sea. A feeling of something a little alarming but grateful in the stomach. Some kind of geometric pull. That distance from us. The potential. The lack of words. The awe. You couldn't put that into words. A lack of words defined it.

Bowie, of course, and the moon walking. Space Oddity. Immense achievement combined with a sense of loss. Floating in a Tin Can......Planet Earth is Blue and There's Nothing I Can Do. Well, I had that experience in the same year. In a hospital. On anaesthetic. What I suppose they would call an out-of-body experience. My eyes were on or in the moon. There was no longer any body or anybody. Everyone was down there living their lives and I was totally disconnected and far from in a superior way. I knew there would never be a way back and there never was so. The moment wholly defined my identity and the rest of my life. I would have been married with kids, as thick as shit, more successful in the workplace and totally indifferent to any sort of artistry. The passenger planes between 30 and 42 which coincided with feeling professionally on the basis of no justification whatsoever that I was going somewhere? They were always accompanied by mild apprehension. On returning from Geneva for the first time, I discovered that my cat had died. Typical - but she was 14. I never thought of planets. They were so high as to be outta sight but it could be mildly pretty above the Little Fluffy Clouds when not reading the adult comic Viz as an unheard statement in Business Class. 1991-1997. Pre Aviation Directorate. No overview at all. We'd come in to Heathrow and I'd never be interested in the sights. The main focus was on a safe landing. That does dovetail in with the glider. There we all were at the UN eventually in what seemed liked the absolute symbol of personalised international harmony and now I had an entire national region in my eyes as a bird would see it apparently. "Wow". It was utterly overwhelming in a visual sense - all those places I couldn't now get to when on land - and how the hell anyone could manage the controls at the same time I'll never know. That is, unless they had been at it as a teenager since 1971 as luckily he had been. Also annoying actually - how dare you.

East Bergholt was not a new new name to me. It often featured in my work in the early 2000s when we pretended that we would build between one and three additional runways at Stansted Airport. I went up to the Consultative Committee quarterly - a bloody difficult three hour journey from my home - and when in the office "dealt with" correspondence in which people pleaded that we didn't "destroy" their AONB of Dedham Vale. "It's Constable Country". Absolute sympathy just as I had with the people at Cliffe. That was "Dickens Country", not pretty in the standard sense but good for the birds and very atmospheric in the fog so that you could see the historical links. "They have put me on environmental mitigation", I'd say. "They know my views - that I'm on your side". I assured them that it was unlikely ever to happen there, whispering it in case I was overheard. I was fought robustly - a right ear bashing at times - but often thanked for being the one representative who appeared human. And I didn't lie to them. The ten of us had 500,000 consultation responses to cope with - the largest ever : Grenfell has had a few hundred - when others assumed that we had teams of three hundred. Mainly coped spectacularly but sporadic breakdowns with long term implications on health. All on an average salary - lower than average in London terms. I was the boss of nine people at one time too while rushing up and down to advise McNulty.

In some ways, I appreciate it. None of us was on the moon or above the clouds. At most in those days a few pints at a gig was the way of believing in a combination of high emotion and nebulous promotion. But others had greater demands - the wife, the husband, the kids - so I was used. Very used. Indifferent as these words show to any economy but I am grateful to them for one thing. While I specialised in environmental protection, I was required to have an overview of the entire project and I did acquire it. The bigwigs of East Bergholt today. Well, I spoke to a few this afternoon on the 'phone. Smashing. Really helpful. Their voices show their sense of position in their place. But I don't think they fully understand or ever will do a less personal sense of insignificant generality. I now resign myself to the fact that they see me as just one of the crowd without having the self-awareness to see the inconsistency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpvccejvVng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohtpAuGaZjw

Lat-Literal at Twitter.Org

[BBMmk2]

Been busy Lat!:)

Than k goodness, the weather people have forecasted the weather wrong!!