Lakeland

Cats and dogs hammered from the sky all last night and all morning, and the consequence of this further violent outpouring of rain even in the driest place in the country, East Anglia, is to be seen all around. Not up here where I live, but driving down into Yoxford today I had to plough through lake after lake, the water nearly coming into the car and my brakes useless until I stopped each time and pumped on the pedal. These sights are depressing enough, but how much worse it must be where the water invades people's homes. "Much worse" is an understatement: devastating and catastrophic are more to the point. Bleating about not being able to do much in the garden when the skies clear and the sun comes out because the ground is sodden feels shameful. So I won't. Bleat.

Once the sky lightened it stayed encouragingly bright until nearly five, and I was able to see my way clearly into the woodshed to get another pile of logs when I returned home. Tonight was going to be my last two episodes of The Bridge III, and I needed to set the scene properly - cosy woodburner, lowish lighting, supper eaten so that I could concentrate on the subtitles. Goodness it was affecting, this series, my first viewing of the amazing Saga and her kindly sidekick Henrik. I was so bowled over by the performance of Sofia Helin that I found intereviews of her talking on YouTube, and I have to say I would never have recognised her. She has teeth! She has a beautiful smile! How she stays in character as the detective with Aspergers is beyond me. It's all over now. I had thought to get the boxed sets of I and II, but I don't think I have the emotional reserves to go through it all again. Wouldn't have missed this last series though.

On the way home I dropped 22 bottles off at the bottle bank, not all of them wine. But what a responsibility it is, especially but not exclusively in the dusk when it's hard to identify the colours of the bottles. Might I have ruined whole containers by dropping the wrong colour in, brown looking so like green in that dimming light? I hesitated before each deposit, agonising again and again until I saw the mixed glass container. Thank goodness for such a sensible option. Why aren't they all mixed?