Just a few months ago

Well it’s colder and wetter than even we in the wilder west of Ireland are used to. July was a washout and August has started off the same way. Which means my meadows will stay uncut at least until Friday. It’s also going to be cold and breezy. In August FFS!

On the plus side, the trades will be finished by Friday, leaving us with a brand new stairwell and upgraded bathrooms.

One of the things we didn’t have done in the initial refurbishment was the staircase. It was, so our builder said, not worth replacing. Mrs S and I didn’t have the budget for it at the time, so we elected to live with the squeaky third and fifth steps.

Then we had difficulty finding a carpenter for the upgrade. So we finally ended up hiring a local handyman to stop the squeaks and fit a dividing half wall with a second handrail, the premise being that if any one of our guests was worse for wear, they had two stair handrails to haul themselves up them wooden hills to Bedfordshire. Or at least the top of the stairs to go talk on the great white telephone with Huey and Ralph. (This is a very old joke, if you don’t understand, ask your Mum and Dad)

Oddly enough, putting in the new half wall along the open side of the stairs has made the back end of the hall feel far warmer. Which is nice. Especially right at the moment.

Which is an unforeseen consequence, but there you go. I have a feeling that we’re going to need all the warmth we can get this year. There’s still a lot of water in the upper atmosphere from the estimated one hundred and forty six plus teragrams (about 146 million tonnes) of water vapour punched into the mesosphere from the Hunga Tonga eruption in January 2023. That’s an added ten percent of the normal global amount of water vapour in the entire atmosphere. Which is why the weather is, and will continue to be, a little odd for the next few years until the atmosphere regains its composure. That was, like our main refurbishment, only a few months ago.

And people make a fuss about a little extra CO2, which compared to water vapour is a picayune bit part player that barely gets a walk on as far as temperature is concerned. And as for our ’emissions’, not even a gnats bollock on a tiny glitch. The planet is in charge, not us. Which should be blindingly obvious to those with even the slightest awareness.

Notwithstanding, we’ve booked a late Summer break in northern France, and are hoping that the weather will take a turn for the better. Brother in law who has a house there has agreed to put us up for a few days. Then there’s a birthday to celebrate. So it’s not all doom and gloom like the media would have you think.