THIS must be the best possible week for measuring the nation’s happiness quotient. I guess it could be found hovering at the top of the scale, so great and plentiful are the reasons to feel good.
For one thing we’ve had weeks of wall-to-wall sunshine so we’re all glowing; there’s a royal wedding, which means a reason to celebrate and keep saying “Aaah, how lovely”; and every day seems like a holiday, because it is.
Canny people have taken Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week as official holiday days, guaranteeing a run of 11 days off on the trot, thanks to the long Easter weekend and now the Wills-n-Kate long weekend.
After that miserably long, cold, wet winter we endured, this extraordinary spring has been the very least we deserved. I know it might have lost the plot and be chucking down hailstones by the time you read this in your BVM, but how truly wonderful it has been while it’s lasted, and how it has restored our winter-wilted spirits.
It hasn’t seemed like April at all. It has been more like a freaky August but without the end-of-season feel, and we’ve still got May, June and July to look forward to before we get to the wicked month.
My farmer’s-wife friend has been a bit gloomy about the terribly dry state of the countryside but honestly, I’ll come and run a watering-can over their fields for them if only we can have a spring like this one again.
I’m sure it has made everyone feel happier and generally more pleasant. Even those with lingering colds (Geoff, for example – yes, he’s on Day 11 of his as I write) can appreciate how much less dire their ailments are than if they were being suffered in the prolonged gloom of a rain-lashed back-end of April.
We did a mammoth family picnic at Easter – the picnic was mammoth, not the family, I should make clear, although we did all lumber somewhat in an ungainly woolly-mammoth fashion on the long walk home. The warmth of the day so early in the year made every part of the experience enjoyable and memorable. We know from bitter experience that just as sand in the sandwiches is part of a beach picnic, so are wasps and sudden downpours essential elements of a picnic in the depths of the countryside – and we suffered neither. It was pure bliss.
As one sunny day followed another, I became more addicted to the comfort of life in a warm climate. I noticed lots of little things that combined to enhance my personal happiness quotient, enabling me to blot out the many and varied sound effects of Geoff’s interminable cold.
These little things have included:
• Eating meals in the garden (it hardly seems to matter what you eat as the food just tastes better).
• Hanging out the washing and being confident it would dry (and not have to be dragged off the line in a panic when a black rain-cloud suddenly bursts overhead).
• Pressing my face into the dry-as-a-bone laundry as I un-peg it and loving its sunny freshness (in the manner of a cheesy TV advert, for which I apologise).
• Sleeping with the windows open and waking to a wildly excitable spring dawn chorus.
• Going out and knowing a coat or umbrella won’t be needed ‘just in case’.
• Walking along a street and feeling ever so slightly continental. So this is what it’s like to live in a country where the heat bounces off the pavement. In April. Wow!
• And one that isn’t anything to do with the weather but is uplifting, too: Kate Middleton’s infectious smile.
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