April Showers

I’m waiting for a taxi in a carpark at Glasgow Airport stinking like a prostitute. There’s snow in the air and I’m layered up, but I made the usual mistake going through duty free of a) buying a bottle of whisky and b) spraying myself with foul smelling aftershave testers – 3 or 4 really awful ones that have given me a headache. Later, at my aunt’s flat I’m drinking red wine and towards the end of the bottle I notice on the label that it is 14.5%. I didn’t think they made wine that strong and it may partly explain why we’re dancing to Abba and keeping the neighbours up yelling and laughing like hyenas.

It’s been a long, hard winter and, just as we thought it was over, another sky full of snow is dumped on the shivering daffodils and the wind has blown my borrowed umbrella to Tim Burtonesque shreds as I wander the beautiful streets of Edinburgh. If they could only stick a giant plastic dome over Glasgow and Edinburgh and install some sunlamps everyone would move up here. They are absolutely the best cities in Britain, except nobody in their right mind would move anywhere this cold and wet.

I’ll be hunted down and killed by the McQueens for saying that, but in our 4^th year back the winter’s lack of LIGHT, the perpetual night and cold and rain in England (never mind Scotland) is wearing us down. We’re crawling into April like pale slugs - desperate for a few rays. On a walk near Devizes a fortnight ago the sun broke through the thick clouds for 10 minutes and we lay on the damp hillside in our coats smiling as the feeble warmth shone down on us as if from another solar system. The only compensation for this accursed subterranean existence is Easter eggs – on which we gorge as if they contained the vitamins we suffer the lack of from this damned winter.

Must, hold on, a little … longer. Summer, ..will be .. here ….soon.