one of those jolly, peaceful mornings that make a fellow wish he'd got a soul or something

Summer is here! Lhud sing cuckoo; also, bah, humbug and the usual grumbling. It's early days yet, however, and in fact the sunny days with not too much actual heat are mostly tolerable, what with the recent rain, green growth everywhere and the little birdies going twit. Or, in the case of the mad pair of peregrines who nest on the hospital opposite our house, screaming their avian pea-brain heads off, presumably in some sort of mating frenzy. There's no accounting for taste; I, for one, am profoundly turned off by yelling. (Punk, so not an aphrodisiac). The warmer days also seem to bring the milk of human kindness bubbling to the surface, and there's been a positive orgy of courtesy and goodwill as we all let each other into the rush-hour traffic, beaming like loons. (This is necessary, the traffic has been unusually dire in the last few days). In keeping with this lightened mood (albeit temporarily, watch me growl once the heat-waves start), summer makes me break out the P.G. Wodehouse. Strange but true.

Summer also means I'm into the cotton skirts, along with their associated doom: t-shirts bare to the onlooker's gaze without intervening warmer covering, and, therefore, the dire necessity for a bra, the which I joyously do not wear all the way through autumn, winter and spring. This is one of the things I actually hate about summer, mostly because there's a sort of Seekrit Girl Club to which I do not belong, viz. the one which shares the arcane knowledge about how to stop your bra straps from perpetually slipping off your shoulders. I lack this skill. I am clearly, for the purposes of bra strap wrangling, not a girl at all. I spend most of summer mournfully raising and lowering the length of the straps, in a sad, futile sort of way, like a short-sighted peeping tom at a parlour blind. What's the secret here? string? superglue? complicated contraptions with magnets? nine-inch nails through the shoulders? I swear, I'm seriously considering the latter. I cannot but feel that it redounds negatively to my professionalism to have my eyes glaze over at intervals, usually in the middle of impassioned curriculum advice, while I grope down my sleeve via the neck.

Happy Summer Sights of the last few days, though: turning in for home past the Common, an elderly man trying to persuade his bull terrier that walkies were, in fact, Over. Man's body angled at 45^o away from dog. Dog's legs all at equal and opposite angle as he digs his feet into the ground, mule-like, and refuses to move. Upshot: by considerable straining on man's part, dog dragged along ground, leaving ruts. I laughed all the way home.

Finally, more graphical info-porn for smoczek: Best Science Visualisations. My disaster-movie-loving soul is obscurely soothed by California falling into the sea as the San Andreas cocks up its toes.