This, that and the other

Phew! I think that's the word. This weekend has seen some rather unusual weather, weather which would be fairly unusual at any time but which in October is actually unheard of. Saturday was officially the hottest day in England since records began with the mercury hitting 29.9 Celsius (that's 85.8 Fahrenheit) at Gravesend in north Kent.

(When I was a boy living in Gillingham my mother would sometimes take my brother and I by bus to Gravesend. It was not an attractive town then and, as far as I am aware, is probably no better now. I remember there was a park near the River Thames which had a pond in which were the most enormous goldfish. The only other thing of interest was the fleet of tugs which was based there - Gravesend, I mean, not on the pond in the park!)

When I took Fern for a walk in Stanmer woods I parked the car in the shade. Even so, the in-car thermometer recorded an easy 27 when I got back to it so it is quite possible that it was almost as hot here as in Gravesend.

Yesterday seemed even hotter. I didn't use the car so saw no temperature reading.


I mentioned, in the comments following my Day 117 post, that I had used a computer programme to calculate that it was indeed Day 117 and Skip responded, with or without His Tongue Planted Firmly in His Cheek, that his cellphone has an app to do that. "An app," I very nearly replied. "What's that?" No, I do know what an app is but my mobile phone is so old that apps hadn't been invented when I bought it.

Time was when I found it relatively easy to calculate the number of days between two dates. I was doing that every working day. In those days, interest charged on loans and overdrafts and paid on deposit accounts by banks was calculated almost entirely manually. We would work out how many days the balance had been £x and multiply the number of days by x to arrive at a number which was noted as "points". The points were totted up when necessary (at the end of the charging period or when the bank rate changed) and the interest charged or paid was then read off a table in a large book. "Laurie's", it was called: "Laurie's Tables" or some such.


Talking of dates, today marks 47 years since I last suffered an asthma attack. I has asthma all my childhood but the last attack was in 1964. This one lasted six weeks and I was wheezing like on old goat when I walked into church. When I walked out again with my new bride on my arm the asthma had gone and it has never returned. Oddly enough, this year I developed a condition which is normally seen only in asthmatics or cystic fibrosis sufferers. That it had appeared so long after I had been cured/grown out of asthma was a cause of great puzzlement to the specialist consultant who was responsible for my treatment.


I have no recollection of the hopes and plans that my child bride and I might have had on that blustery but bright October Saturday all those years ago. Maybe we didn't have any and were content to take each day as it came, happy in each others love and companionship. That's not to say I wouldn't make changes if I were to walk that way again, but on the whole the years have been good to us.