Diary – 9 August 2018

The British weather is just like the worst boyfriend. The kind that keeps you in a state of permanent insecurity over their intentions. ‘See you later,’ they say blithely on departing in the morning, a comment that could equally well mean after lunch, or sometime in the second half of the year. Our programming for disappointment is so deep that even during the recent weeks of sunshine it’s been hard to feel completely safe in making future plans. Supper tomorrow in the garden? A picnic next weekend? Is that hubristic? Should we have a plan B?

Of course when the days have turned out to be glorious, just as when the nightmare lover is at their most charming, the experience is hugely enhanced by the fact that we can’t rely upon it. As soon as good behaviour can be taken for granted either from the skies above or our fellow humans, it loses some of the thrill that uncertainty promotes.

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We have been spending some time in a rented flat in Aldeburgh, just down the road from where Wilkie Collins wrote the underrated No Name.