Emerges, blinking, into the daylight

It's not that I haven't been posting much, exactly - or only rapid, throwaway posts (which I enjoy, but feel don't really count). But I've been nibbling away at a longish post about Shetland, and not getting to the point where I'm ready to post it. It begins with a paragraph about how hot it is here, and what a contrast to our cool, rainy holiday - and that paragraph gets edited each time I revisit the post, which is silly. Right now I'm shaping up for a five-things-makes-a-post type post (and even that has been taking longer than I intended), so let's have the weather report as the first of those five things, and get it out of the way.

• It was too hot, serious record-breaking summer. Fortunately the house does a good job of staying pleasantly cool (mostly), and the heat came as a real surprise each time I went outside, which I did as little as possible: to go to the pool, to put out and bring in the dustbin. Increasingly I gave in to the temptation to stay downstairs, writing in my notebook at the kitchen table, rather than use my desktop in the attic, where the heat rises and lingers. The heat makes me idle, too, or that's my excuse for spending afternoons lying on the sofa with a book. Also, I was sleeping badly, and was drowsy during the day. But on Thursday there were ominous rumblings in the sky, and on Friday the heavens opened. It's too early to declare the summer heatwave over, but for the time being the weather reports warn of floods, not of heatstroke. I'm not complaining.



• Would I be as sanguine about the rain if I had been caught in the downpour? Yes, as it happens I was and I am. We had a repeat of last year's lunch date with anef who is in Durham for the Classics Summer School, and this time she was accompanied by doubtingmichael - at lunch, not at the summer school. So there were four of us to explore the tapes menu, and discuss tales from Herodotus, and discover that we had people in common offline as well as on (doubtingmichael had been in a writing group with valydiarosada). After which we set off to enjoy our various afternoons. Mine included the Oxfam bookshop, at which I disappointingly failed to make any purchases (it's the old complaint that their prices would be reasonable if I had gone into the shop in search of that particular book, but do not tempt me to impulse purchases). On the way home - it's not a long way, but I stopped off at the market and the greengrocer - I was caught in three separate showers.



• Back home, the kitchen was also awash, as we were in the process of defrosting the fridge. This is always painful, as we always leave it too long. The fridge is supposed to be self-defrosting, but all this means is that there is no mechanism to speed up the process. In that sense, doing it during a heatwave made sense, although it left us with no way to refrigerate anything (the milk lake was the main casualty here). But once the frisge starts dripping on the floor, there is no arguing with it, you might as well switch it off, and declare the defrosting official. I dislodged a coule of chunks of ice, realised that the process was not yet complete, and had a shower instead. Mid-afternoon showering felt quite decadent, but I was already so wet that why not?



• durham_rambler showed me a picture in the Guardian: "They've found a Roman biro!" he said. Obviously, I assumed he was talking about Vindolanda, bui no, this was in London: I went to Rome and all I got you was this lousy pen...cite



• ( Saturday night in Gateshead )

Further to our last

I find Dreamwidth's spell-checker very helpful, in spotlighting at least some of my many typos. I very rarely take its advice in correcting them, though. For one thing, it wants me to use US spelling. For another, it struggles with proper names. Here's what it has just suggested as alternatives to 'Bellowhead':

Bellow head, Bellow-head, Bellowed, Bullhead, Blowhard, Billowed, Wellhead, Bellied, Behead, Blockhead, Bullheads, Bullhead's

It didn't recognise Vindolanda or Gateshead, either, and I was going to say that its suggested alternatives were less inventive, but looking again, while 'Wonderland' for Vindolanda has a certain logic, confronted with Gateshead it just gets silly:

Stashed, Guested, Gusseted, Gusted, Starched, Gestated, Stitched, Gestured, Gazetted, Quested, Dustsheet, Mustached, Cosseted