Monday 27 June 2011

Scorcher

Phew, what a scorcher, as the tabloids will no doubt be screaming tomorrow morning, just in case we hadn't noticed that it's been rather warm today.

Driving around the M25 just after lunchtime, the car thermometer was reading 35 - that must be into the nineties in old money.

At home, it was far too hot to walk the dog during the day and so I took her out about half an hour before it got dark. Even that was fairly warm work, evidenced by the fact that as soon as we got home Barley went out in the garden and had a quick wade in the paddling pool that Nicky had bought for her today.

Nicky had a physio appointment today (thanks to there being a cancellation when she phoned this morning). Apparently, some of the pain has been caused by a strain in her calf muscles where she has been limping around for the last few weeks. The kneading of the ankle and lower leg was painful, "but in a good way".

I was in London this afternoon for a meeting just along the road from St Pancras, and as my meeting finished at about quarter to five I popped into the British Library to have a look at their "Out of this World" exhibition about science fiction. It was a good distraction for twenty minutes or so. They had lots of early editions and manuscripts of important works, and it turns out that even C S Lewis had a go at SF in his time. Being the uncultured soul that I am, I was particularly pleased to see a model DeLorean in the Alternate Realities section!

I finished off Ed Stourton's book yesterday. He clearly is a fully paid up member of the dog lovers' club now. Some of the passages about Kudu were very Barley-esque! I particularly enjoyed his quote from Kipling, even if, as he said, it is rather sentimental.

Wimbledon has been interesting today, with all of the fourth round matches taking place. Murray made it through in straight sets, but some of the others made harder work of it - Nadal and Federer both dropped sets on the way through, and the ladies' line up lost a few big names including both Williams sisters.

As it says on the way in to Centre Court, Kipling again: "If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same".

(By the way - Dad - good to see the picture banner back - no idea why it went away, and equally no idea what brought it back - but at least it has reappeared!)