Capricious Spring.

Five days ago we in Britain were basking in record high temperatures, and we’d had enough warm, dry weather by then to be half convinced that summer had arrived early this year. This morning there was snow in the cold, spitting rain being driven across the landscape by icy, gale force winds (storm force in some places further west.) It was being driven across my garden, too, flattening the taller and more precocious plants and wrestling my prize, bloom-laden broom bush almost to breaking point. How the climate managed to go suddenly backwards from June to February is a little hard to fathom.

An added problem for me is that I’m becoming quite the wimp these days. I can’t tolerate inclement weather now. It adds a further layer of depression to a mind already far more familiar with the downside than it used to be.

So now I’m off to do my week’s ironing to get warm. My house is old and draughty, and the delinquent wind entertains the conviction that it’s free to come in here any time it chooses.

But at least I got the chance to use the word ‘capricious.’ I like that word and use it whenever the opportunity presents itself. I didn’t even know what it meant until I watched Jiri Menzel’s splendid opus Capricious Summer a few short decades ago. There’s lots of kind, gentle, summer rain in it, and lots of people with mundane issues keenly observed. And not a single gun in sight. I try never to watch films with guns in them any more.