Everybody's favorite topic?

I keep having to re-adjust my expectations of the weather down here. As we approach the depths of September it's not unknown to have nice crisp sunny days as the weather attempts to make up for it's disappointment for the summer proper. To that end we went for a walk around the local Country Park on Saturday in an effort to ensure we took advantage of the Great Outdoors^tm. Jeans, trainers and a light leather jacket seemed to be the required apparel for the excursion. It turned out I had grossly overestimated as was evidenced by the afternoon which I spent enjoying my garden enjoying reading with a cold beer while wearing shorts and sandals. I never really fully appreciated the garden at Barton road which was mainly a location for BBQ's than any real garden based lounging. The main problem it had was the limited arc of sky allotted to the Sun which necessitated all sorts of manoeuvring to track it. The garden we have in our rented house is conveniently south facing meaning bright mornings in the kitchen and if the sun is out a nice long languorous setting keeping the patio area nicely warmed to the last.

The fact it was nice weather yesterday actually encouraged me to plug into my podcasts and start a bit of hoeing in an effort to keep the weeds at bay. It may be I have found a reason to get more involved in this gardening malarkey. It remains to seen if such enthusiasm can be maintained as we approach the depths of winter. It was mentioned recently that the trouble with Manchester rain isn't the fact it rains a lot (indeed it's lower than the UK average) but it's pervasiveness. The clouds are simply too lazy to dump all their rain in one go and instead subjecting it's citizens to the well known day-long drizzle. Clouds around here are generally more efficient so it rains in bursts. However on the flip side we do get long sustained winds rolling off the fens that irritatingly change direction between my cycle in and my return journey. It seems wherever you go in the UK there will always be something wrong with the weather.....