St Swithin's Day

"Well, it is July," I said to R, as we sat disconsolately over our coffee and biscuits, watching the rain beating down outside. "What can you expect?" He made a snorting noise that might just about have been interpretable as a laugh. Later though, boredom-scrolling through the socials revealed to me that today's weather is in fact no laughing matter, because it's St Swithin's Day:

St Swithin's Day, if it does rain
Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin's Day, if it be fair
For forty days, t'will rain no more.

Uh-oh.

A surprising number of people seem to take this kind of thing seriously, which must make their lives a bit trying. Luckily, I'm neither superstitious nor pessimistic - except about, you know, global warming, the extinction crisis, right-wing populism, political corruption, and my chances of ever reducing the number of items on my to-do list (or even the number of my to-do lists) to single figures. So I shrugged my shoulders at the rain, firmly averted my gaze from the garden (which I swear was growing as you looked at it), grabbed a few feeder shots of this rather spiffy Great Spotted Woodpecker through the cleanest window pane I could find, and thought Never mind - there's always tomorrow. Or if not tomorrow, maybe the last Sunday in August. 

R: C3, D 12.