the corner office

There's been no snow since the beginning of January, but it did start raining. And it kept raining. And soon the whole country could talk about nothing else.

Unlike football, talking about the weather is a British conversation I'm not averse to participating in. "It's been rainin' for over 40 days," said the lady at the local chippy. "Aberdeen's gone without sun for the longest time since records began." "Wow", (or somesuch) I responded. I'd known about the 40 days thing, but not the Aberdeen thing.

"Yeah, I have all these facts stored in my head," said the chippy lady, in a tone somewhere between proud and embarassed, "but they're all useless things to know."

("... except for pub quizzes," she added, thoughtfully.)

And indeed it had been raining for a long time, for 40 days, and a few days more, and it was inevitable that newspaper headlines drawing biblical parallels would follow. But - and I say this with sympathy for the people affected elsewhere by storms and flooding - I felt that the "biblical weather" descriptions were a little over the top, at least in our neck of the woods. Yes it rained, but nobody would associate London rain with words like "deluge", and yes rain fell each day, but it was often intermittent.

Anyway, that's my London-rain-isn't-real-rain hobbyhorse indulgence taken care of for a while longer (sorry dear!) Any weather's better than none.