They got it right.

The weather gurus, I mean. They told us we would have rain yesterday - and we did. It actually woke me so it must have been raining pretty hard to do that. And it wasn't only the weather girls who were right. Some of Brighton Lions were spot on as well, and they forecast the rain rather earlier than the weather girls. For the last three or maybe four years, Brighton lions have held a barbecue at the house of one of our members. A very nice house it is, too. Way out in the country and several centuries old. Bill has had the house extended but it has been done so sympathetically it is difficult to tell which is old and which is new. Anyway, the first Wednesday in August meant a barbecue at Bill's. Every year we have been lucky with the weather. One year it poured down the day before; another time we watched the lightning gradually getting closer as we cleared up. But every year we were able to hold our bbq. This year, though, we have changed our social meeting night from the first Wednesday of the month to the first Thursday. So the barbie should have been last night, but ten days or so ago, it was agreed not to hold a barbecue but to have an informal dinner at one of the Italian restaurants in town. Now, had we not changed the meeting day all would have been well; Wednesday evening was fine and warm. But how lucky we were that the decision was taken to cancel!

Having a meeting in a restaurant in Brighton prompts me to comment that there are more restaurants per 1,000 population in Brighton than in any other town in the UK. We could quite easily eat at a different venue every night for a year and still not have covered them all. I do tend to forget this fact when I'm in another town. I have cursed the lack of eating places in towns and cities as far apart as Blackpool and Norwich, Bristol and Leeds. What is surprising as well is that all these restaurants tend to be busy on every night of the week.

I have to admit that I was not sorry to see the rain. I should have used the hose on the vegetables several days back but something else cropped up and distracted me (that happens only too easily) and the last couple of days I prevaricated as the forecast was for rain on Thursday. Mind you, our local farmers might not be quite so happy: they had started harvesting the barley on Tuesday and were still hard at it on Wednesday. I suppose they will now have to wait for the crop to dry a bit before they can carry on. Or can they dry the grain after cutting these days?