Having lived most of my life in London, I’d come to the realisation early on that the one aspect I hated most was the weather. This would be of no surprise to most of its citizens, or any of its visitors (apart from those lucky enough to be there during the three or four days that constitute a typical summer).
An optimist would see something good about this.
I’d see the optimist on the other side of this window, dangling over the terrace wall.
There are two features that hurt the most – and I do mean hurt: the way the moisture-laden wind makes it feel ten degrees colder than the same temperature anywhere else; and the constant, life-sapping, wearisome fucking greys (the plural is deliberate: grey is for Londoners as snow is for Eskimos).
I thought I had escaped when we moved to Ljubljana, where such weather conditions manifest themselves only as part of the proper four seasons the ungrateful denizens enjoy, making parts of November and February a bit dull.
But the gods of whether (do we live here? do we live there?) conspired to plonk us here in Brussels, where happily the wet-wind thing is largely absent – no doubt partly why its people are rather more relaxed than Londoners.
But. The. Fucking. GREYS.
Oh my good giddy aunt. I actually can’t remember the last time we saw a blue sky for more than two days in a row. A member at the club laughingly said, “But you come from London! You should be used to it!”
Grrnnnggnnnphh.
You can’t get used to grey. It’s not a colour, it’s an infinitely variable lack of colours, it sucks the colour out of everything else, it’s the antithesis of colour – it’s why parrots and exotic plants don’t venture north: they’d expire through lack of colour. The only thing that remains colourful is my fucking language.
Sorry about that. I blame the weather.
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