"Christopher Robin!"

"Yes?"
"Have you an umbrella in your house?"
"I think so."
"I wish you would bring it out here, and walk up and down with it, and look up at me every now and then, and say 'Tut-tut, it looks like rain.'"
                                         - Winnie the Pooh


I was speaking to an American friend of mine the other day, and she said that where she lives in Arizona people think that it pours with rain all day every day in England. My friend has lived over here for a year, and she knows from first hand experience that this is untrue, but as always, there is a grain of truth in the misconception.
   One problem is that our rain is not confined to any one 'season' - it spreads itself out in a very benevolent and unbiased fashion; so it might rain any day of the year, or it might not rain at all for a whole month.

Perhaps one reason why foreigners think it always rains here, is that our rain has no respect for summer. There's no saying for instance "I want a dry day for my wedding/garden party/village fete etc., so I'll have it in July." Even if July is the driest on record for a hundred years, you can bet your bottom dollar the one day it does rain is on the day you've chosen.

The main thing to remember is that it's changeable and unreliable. For example, there might be light mizzle for two hours during the morning; or perhaps a quick shower at two o'clock in the afternoon; or a really heavy down-pour at four; and the rest of the day may, or may not, be completely dry, and there may or may not be some blue sky.
Or perhaps you wake up to blue skies and glorious sunshine at 7:00am, only to find it overcast at 8:00am and by 10:00am it's splashing. Then it suddenly dries up in the afternoon and the sun comes come out, but just as you're getting used to it, there's another shower at 6:00pm. Or it perhaps it will rain all night and be completely dry the next day; or on the other hand it might stay overcast for three days together and never rain once.
  And of course, there are different types of rain. It would be very dull indeed if it always 'poured'. No! We have many different 'rainy' adjectives, depending on many variants: the size of the raindrops, how many of them there, how close they are together, how quickly they fall... Just think of Eskimos and snow..

"Moses supposes.."

"Moses supposes his toes-es are roses,
  but Moses supposes erroneously."

Our garden is now full of roses of all different colours. Pink, peach, and yellow, they are climbing through the hedges, tumbling out of the flower beds, and spilling over across the paths.
They make lovely flower arrangements - this one was made with pink and yellow roses, chervil, and purple geraniums. I originally cut the flowers with the intention of making them into several smaller arrangements, but when I had them laid out on the dining-room table afterwards, on a sheet of newspaper to stop the pollen making too much mess, they looked so happy all together in one group, that I left them to it.

Recently I have been enjoying reading 'The Italian' by Mrs Radcliffe. I have never gasped aloud so much at any book before - talk about melodrama! There were such terrific twists and turns of the plot as I should not have thought possible; and the heroine had so many narrow escapes and near-death experiences (to say nothing of the sufferings of the poor hero at the hands of the Inquisition) that I'm surprised my hair had not turned white by the end of it.