And lo, there was water

It's raining. It's been raining since Tuesday evening, and hasn't stopped.

What happened then was that I walked out of work at 4:30pm to wait for the bus (to get to the station, to catch the train, to get to Woking, to wait for a train, to catch the train, to get to Walton, to walk back to the house that Jack built), and it was warm, and certainly bright if not particularly sunny. The weather didn't change in the 18 minutes before I caught my train, but when I sat down at Woking at 5pm there was a bright flash followed by an incredibly loud peal of thunder. It then began to rain very hard (but mercifully stopped just long enough for me to walk home).

Tuesday night brought us the freak thunderstorms that hit London, which caused major flooding in many parts and hellish traffic the next day. Since then... it pretty much hasn't stopped raining.

Now, my weekend is set to look something like this:

Saturday

get free Ben & Jerry's icecream in Portobello Market

wander round London

attend a Terry Pratchett signing (or, as Kevin so uniquely put it, "maybe get some bloke to scrawl in a book or two")

Sunday

possibly go to a local steam fair (that is, a fairground with rides powered by steam. Not exactly adreneline-rushing rides, but still fun enough)

possibly hunt out Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since it looks interesting

Note that, unusually for us (well... actually, I'll come back to that later), this involves spending lots of time outdoors. And the weekend weather was actually looking to be fairly promising, given the week we've had, but no! We grew arrogant in our abundance of fair and sunny weather, forgetting that this weekend is an English bank holiday weekend (which traditionally means: miserable). Gah.

I'd rather not repeat the spectacle of my last-but-one Terry Pratchett signing, which was in the rain - I generally arrive up to 2 hours before the signings start, to secure a fairly decent place in the queue and ensure that I get round fairly quickly once the line starts moving. This particular signing took place a couple of days before the book in question was to be published, so I bought my copy from the shop and settled down to read in the queue. (Knowing that I'd be there for some time, I had actually had the foresight to bring a little fold-out camping stool just for the queue. This gathered strange looks aplenty, but no sore feet.)

Of course, as said, it began to rain. Thus occurred the amusing (to bystanders, at least) sight of me sitting on said stool, balancing a hardback book on my lap, holding an umbrella in one hand, and reading with the other. Once the queue started moving, however, it was: hold the umbrella with one hand, hold the book with the other, and panic when it came to turning pages. My, that was fun.

Anyway, "...unusually for us, this involves spending lots of time outdoors." In fact, Kevin and I defied the Geek Club Code the last two weekends in a row (when it was nice, sunny weather) and actually went out for a walk, for no other purpose than to walk round pretty places in the bright sunny sunshine. We're pretty confident of retaining our membership in said Club, though, since about an hour and a half of gentle walking led to us collapsing when we got back to the house. (Look, there was sunshine, and heat, and lack of water, okay?)

Plus a few sidenotes:

• Stuart is right (in my opinion, of course), The Little Friend by Donna Tartt is not really worth reading. I abandoned said tome after about 250-300 pages, which consisted of about 200-250 pages of character notes and little else. It's arguably well-written, if you take, say, an individual paragraph (that is, if you can find one without parentheses... yes, I know, irony, hypocrisy, but I'm not publishing this professionally, right?), but it's just dull. I very rarely give up on books, but this was one of them.

  The other two books I can remember giving up on in the last few years are: the first of Robert Jordan's "Wheel Of Time" series, after being assured by a few people that it gained little more plot, and the first of Robert Rankin's books. I rarely enjoy purely silly fantasy, but in contrast I liked the Tom Holt book that Kevin lent me. That struck a good note with me; the Robert Rankin struck a weird note.

• After last year's very expensive cut and blowdry (£16.50 for the cut, and the same again to have your hair dried properly), I can confirm that this is no longer the case. It now costs £17.50 for each of the above services. I left with damp hair.