Weather

Back to the Worcester Royal fracture clinic. The consultant asked me to draw a picture of what happened... um, well here's a metal corkscrew thing, and here's my thumb... and student years of playing Pictionary failed to come to my assistance. Then he confirmed the opinion of yesterday's excellent nurse. So I was just rebandaged, and will keep taking the antibiotics and go back next Tuesday for presumably another x-ray.

There was a hard frost overnight, and still fog on the hill when we returned at 11.30am. Meanwhile, east Worcester was bathed in sunshine. It looks as though we have our own microclimate - not so much a frost hollow as a frost eminence. And while it was sunny outside, I was stuck in a windowless outpatients waiting room with fans going. Ho hum. Still, it brightened up in the afternoon, there was a wonderful golden sunset behind the Malverns, and the boilerman is coming tomorrow.

Benedictines have a book read aloud at meals. We had been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's "History of Christianity", but since the move, we think it is (deliberately?!) in a box at the bottom of a big pile of boxes. So for light relief, we are reading Kate Fox's "Watching the English". The first chapter is on the weather. Apparently we talk about it a lot, but not because of any interest in the weather or because English weather is interesting; it's a form of greeting, an ice-breaker, a lull-filler. "Cold today, isn't it?" "Yes, freezing." And it is bad manners not to agree with the first statement/question. So I hereby declare that I might on occasion break some rules by talking about the weather as though I'm interested, or not necessarily agree with you - "Actually, I think it's quite mild compared with the seasonal average" - but I make no apologies!