Tea Solves Everything
After a quite beautiful weekend, the sky decided that enough was enough today, and not content with rolling dark clouds across the hereabouts, it dumped several billion gallons of water across the country. Obviously unconvinced that we might get the message (if there is one), the sky is apparently going to repeat the deluge throughout the week.
I wore full waterproofs to work today. The journey typically takes about fifteen minutes – in that time the rain got through the waterproofs, filled my shoes, and soaked my clothes through to my underwear. I spent the majority of the day barefoot at my desk, with my shoes and socks hanging on a radiator in an unused office next door.
Returning home this evening was worse – much worse. I stopped at the grocery store a mile from home to get food for dinner, and worried that my shoes had filled with water – each step towards the doors of the supermarket spurted water through the shoelace holes. After squelching my way around the store, I slithered back onto my bike, and carried on home – stripping off inside the back door while Miss 14 presented me with a present from her trip to France.
I love that our children don't worry about how people look – their entire focus is usually on what they are doing, or what they have for you. I stood dripping in my t-shirt and underwear in the kitchen, clutching everything I had been wearing, and tried to sound interested in her very important obvervations about the chocolates she had bought me from the airport in France.
The chocolates are now hidden behind the tea in the kitchen cupboard. Even though I'm sharing them, if I leave them out Miss 18 will claim them as her own in the early hours of the morning. This kind of behaviour has slowly reduced the entire house to a strange sort of police state – with each of us jealously guarding chocolate like demented dragons.
In other news, I still haven't drunk any alcohol. It's been 10 days now. It would be wrong to say I don't miss it – but I'm not sure if that's just habit. There is a bottle of wine in the fridge right now – I thought about pouring myself a glass earlier, but then chose orange juice instead. The only reason I didn't is because I'm on this damn fool crusade to try not drinking for a while – to see how much difference it makes. Remember the time I stopped drinking coffee ? I suppose I'm lucky really – to not have the addictive thing in my make-up.
While unwell recently – well... the entire month of May really, wasn't it – I drank colossal quantities of tea. For some reason I go off coffee from time to time. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's that trick your body does – where if it doesn't want something, it will trick you into not liking it. Tea seems to be the cure-all for me – but then I wonder if that's a genetic thing with English people – we solve everthing with a cup of tea, and have a huge amount of confidence in tea solving pretty much everything too.