It’s raining. Actually, it’s barely raining. It’s the sort of rain in which you have to run around to get wet.
In the Scots tongue it’s called “roukie”, a sort of misty/hazy/drizzly/foggy combo. When it settles on Mrs F’s hair, her normally well-controlled immaculateness is transformed into a fearsome frizz which could take the eye out of anyone passing within two metres of her.
Not that anyone, least of all me, would want to get that close if she’s not looking her best. Saying the wrong thing could be more dangerous than lighting a cigarette while fuelling the car. You’d never know what hit you.
The paltry precipitation currently dampening the Fyne Place veggie patch is the stuff that drives you mad when you’re driving. Switch the wipers off and the windscreen soon becomes opaque. Switch them on and they dry out then squeak like someone rubbing a balloon with sandpaper.
They’re on and off more often than an amber list holiday destination.
I should have guessed that the weather would fade after we returned home from two weeks down south in endless hot sunny weather. For a fortnight, I dressed daily in shorts and T-shirt, except when they required washing following an unfortunate episode with a Mr Whippy 99 and a particularly messy Flake chocolate.
While that might sound like a dodgy encounter advertised on a postcard in city newsagent’s window, it was entirely innocent I assure you.
Still, the well-worn shorts are now stowed away and probably won’t reappear for some time, despite much of the Highlands now doing a rain dance. April was as dry as a kangaroo’s jockstrap while June saw less than half of our expected rainfall. A fine July sent water demand soaring. Levels in Loch Ness are dropping down again towards last month’s five-year low, although the prospects of walking directly from Dores to Drumnadrochit are still some way off and Nessie needn’t move home just yet.
Perhaps a chronic drought could ease the problems faced by CalMac on some of its congested crossings. Folk could just drive across to various destinations rather than using a ferry. That would doubtless delight Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar who reckons the company isn’t fit for purpose and “needs to go”. Well, sorry pal, I think it does an amazing job in challenging circumstances and I wouldn’t set sail in a plastic pedalo on a benign boating pond if you or your political peers were running it.
Beware politicians thinking they do everything best.
I’m doing my bit for water conservation, though, by refusing to wash the car, drinking less tea, frying tatties for dinner rather than boiling them and taking my medicinal dram undiluted. It’s the least I can do.
It does strike me as odd, though, that we never seem to construct any reservoirs nowadays. We build houses by the thousands, most with extra en suite bathrooms, and yet we never see new water stores created to collect it when it arrives in bulk over the winter.
Too many houses, not enough water methinks. This has echoes of Aberdeen’s city centre where it might face a situation of too many cinemas with not enough customers if plans for a new four-screen venue in the Bon Accord Centre come to fruition.
I’m not a movie buff. In fact, I haven’t been to a cinema since the days when you went in wearing a cardigan and came out wearing a jumper. They weren’t called flea pits for nothing.
No one munched open tubs of popcorn then in case you swallowed a mouthful of insect protein in the process.
Cinemas have been spectacularly transformed from those days when they were heading for extinction, but I reckon enough is enough. They’re not really required for illicit canoodling nowadays and I’d rather see people getting out and about in the real world than sitting in the dark in yet another fantasy one.
Perhaps some new reservoirs could provide wonderful leisure opportunities and more available water, too.
Now, though, the rain here has stopped and the sun is shining, although forecasters predict some noisy thunderstorms this weekend.
Maybe they’re just anticipating what will happen if Mrs F’s hair turns frizzy again.