It's been close. July, not even a particularly hot July, but everyone has slowed down, the days have the tiring texture of softening butter.
People are falling asleep at strange moments. It's not even been hot, just warm. England can't cope with weather. Any weather. People and dogs all have the same burdened expression. Yet more weather and the only thing for it is to talk about it.

But is has been close, and tonight it's finally thundered. Blue white lightning and heavy rain, so I take a golfing umbrella (no-one has ever bought a golfing umbrella; our house is a graveyard of corperate logoed umbrellas on top of radiators) and slip out the back door.

And outside it smells of pavement, soil, rosemary, lavender and eucalyptus; of people's front gardens. The rain is so heavy the road looks like lawn. And it's ghost story colours again, orange and blue backlot colours. And it's like the night in Italy which was only weeks ago, but could have been never, where I walked in the same type of storm along the lake back from the cafe my hotel in a night that could only have been made for ghost stories, past the windowless bulk of the derelict Lido Palace, and the little lakeside shrine the Virgin was lit up with an omenous red candle. It was hard not to think of omens, or to pray on that sort of night. Everytime the lightning flashed ordinary things looked like men in the dark.

But there is nowhere to walk tonight because I know this town nineteen years too well, and so go home with muddy ankles.

My granny is staying with us. She took us to the botanical gardens today, G and B took this in bad grace. Sister A stayed at home, but I had the responsibilty of keeping the sulkers in line and acceptable in front of our grandmother the Supreme Matriarch, who's judgement is always forthright but often fallable.

G- the brother- was conveniently ill, having already decided at dinner last night he didn't want to go to the botanical gardens, and if we had to go to the botanical gardens he wanted to go to Kew, which wasn't where we were going. For a healthy boy he is often ill. I don't even think he fakes it, so much as he sulks an illness into being. He decides to be ill and becomes ill. But never too ill not to eat icecream or do something he's chosen.

The gardens made me want to be one of the people who knows the names of plants and birds, and to remember my classics to recall which lover and which nymph and who's blood and whose tears became which flower or the other. But it was too close and my mind was buttery.

I might write a bit more tomorrow, another entry since it's been a while (and love to 5th Story by the way, before I forget) I have things to write about but they're only scraps of things which I'm trying to bundle together in my mind but keep dropping. Suffragettes and war profiteers and missing my bus, that's what I might write about tomorrow.