Comme Il Pleut
30 July

So, far this summer has been one of the wettest on record.

In fact, it has been ten years since we had a June which was as wet.

Personally, this does not seem to have touched me. April was so sunny that the summer and the light seem to have been with us for so long that the rain has not registered. However, this last weekend was the first time (probably since April) that I have sat out in the garden for two consecutive days. Today was the first time that I have sat out in the garden and drank coffee before breakfast. And I've just realised that we have not used the picnic basket once yet this year.

Since then it has been cold and wet. We have not had the deluges that have swamped elsewhere but the ground is still dark and damp.

Sheffield and Doncaster and Hull were worst hit by the rain at the beginning of the month. Then two weeks ago, further downpours cause rivers in the South West to flood and the confluence of the Avon and the Severn at Tewksbury burst its banks with disastrous consequences for the neighbourhood. There's houses without power and water still.

According to the farming programmes on the radio, there will be hard times to come. You can draw a horizontal line through Europe from the Spanish/French border to the East and, below that line, the ground is scorched and the crops are desicated whilst above the line, the ground is waterlogged and the crops are rotting and spoilt. Either way, in the UK, we are importing vegetables at a time of the year when we are normally self-sufficient.

It is likely that there will be shortages of green vegetables this winter. It is extremely likely that prices will rise. Because the hay crop is spoilt, the cost of winter fodder will rise and so therefore the cost of meat will increase as well.

Overall, providing that the weather returns to normal patterns, it will be April of next year before the ground is anything like back to normal.

As ever, the weather has provided for winners and losers in the garden. I don't think that the honeysuckle has ever produced such abundant flowers before. The hostas have done well and lasted long. The buddleja and the tree mallow have grown to epic proportions. The new gladioli are flourishing boldly. The roses, however, are not wonderful and the red hot pokers failed to show. The various jasmines have not really been up to much and the plums and raspberries have, surprisingly, been most disappointing.

One other seasonal thing to note is the disappearance of light from the setting sun in the back downstairs room. From about my birthday on 19 May until around 23 July (ie about a month either side of the summer solstice), the setting sun casts light straight down the line of back gardens and into the Music Room. The retreating trajectory means that by now the sun sets further towards the south and is hidden behind the houses again. It will be ten months before I get the late evening sun once more in my face as I type.

The month finished on a couple of semi-positive notes with me trying to introduce something like a bit of staff development at Connect and trying to make positive interventions in the lives of our customers with some useful results (like Ed and Stephen) and some less useful (like Zoe and James).

We also had a family gathering for Grace's eightieth birthday with Linda, Ian and Mary. There was splendid meal at the King's Gap Hotel in Hoylake, kite flying on the beach and then I provided champagne for a toast back at the house.

I also had an interview - for a training job in the NHS. I didn't get the job but I did get some excellent feedback. However, they decided on an equally good candidate with hospital experience which probably means that they had someone internal lined up and were simply going through the motions.

In any case, I could not have accepted the job if offered. The salary was stated as £16K to £19K. I had worked out that I could just about afford to drop to £18K but no further. What I hadn't bargained with was an NHS rule that outsiders coming into an NHS job are always started on the bottom of a scale. I'm used to other public sector rulings which take into accounts current salaries when determining where on a salary scale you are started. This maybe explains why I have regularly not been successful in getting interviews in the NHS. I am simply going to have to apply for higher salaried jobs.

Over the past six weeks, I've been listening to the radio event of the year - The Making Making Music. This is a history of Western European music from the early middle ages to the present day. Hosted and written by Radio 4 news presented, James Naughtie, it has, so far, provided an excellent broad based survey of the social and political contexts for the creation of what we now view as art/music. I was more intrigued by the earlier histories, about which I know less, than events relating to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The series has now stopped at about 1850 and, after the Proms season has finished, will conclude in the autumn.

Monday night Ross and I headed off to our local Plaza cinema for Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer. After the excess of Spiderman 3, it was good to have a special effects, comic book film which did not have multiple baddies and multiple plots. And it was also good to see London being destroyed rather than the usual bits of the USA. And it was pleasant to see Ioan Gruffudd and Chris Evans strut their be-lycraed stuff again.

During the week Ross and I watched a DVD and it brought a rare moment when I got caught out by something I'd not heard about. Bobby is a film which had totally slipped under my radar. I vaguely remember hearing mention but I had no sense of its value and worth. Suffice it to say that, after Pan's Labyrinth, it is probably now my favourite film of the year so far. Set in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles on the night of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, it follows the interwoven stories of some 22 people (fictionalised) people who are in and around the establishment. I loved the sense of ensemble acting from the likes of Demi Moore as a washed out, drunken chanteuse, Sharon Stone as a has-been beautician, Elijah Wood and Lindsay Lohan as a young couple marrying so that he can avoid the Vietnam draft but discovering love, Christian Slater as a low-key racist restaurant manager, Laurence Fishburne as a patrician Head Chef, Harry Belafonte as an elderly ex-hotel employee and so on.

Gradually and imperceptibly over the two hours I got totally drawn into the human stories. I was taken also by the integration of archive footage of Kennedy campaigning in California and vocal archives of speeches that he made. When, eventually, Shiran Shiran's shots rang out, the effect was gut-wrenching. It wasn't the death of an (unseen) politician. It was the reaction of the characters who had become familiar and whose despair and shock was so telling. Frankly, I was in tears and sobbing. Altogether, excellent.

Come Saturday, Ross and I were heading over the tops and into Derbyshire for Buxton Festival's production of Donizetti's Roberto Devereux. I took a deep breath passing through Knutsford but, overall, the journey went well and, though my shoulders told me that I had been tense, I got through it.

The performance was sensational. It made me wonder why this work is not more often performed. And I suspect that the main reason is to do with the size of current opera houses and the volume of modern orchestras - with a small house like Buxton with room for only a moderate sized orchestra, voices are favoured in ways that they aren't elsewhere.

Susan Bickley needs no introduction here. I've enjoyed her work over the past decade with the exception of the Wagner which she shouldn't have been singing - Twice Through the Heart, Albert Herring, Jephtha, Rusalka, Tristan und Isolde and, most recently, Dido and Æneas. Hers is a wonderfully, thrilling voice wedded to an accomplished stage presence. Mary Plazas's performance was more of a revelation. When I've seen her before, The Elixir of Love and La vida breve, I've felt that her voice was small. Not here. She rode the coloratura in elemental fashion.

I'm so glad that, once a year, Buxton comes around offering the chance to attend well prepared, well presented productions of rarities which would otherwise have escaped me. I don't want to wish my life away but roll on next year's festival.

I've also just finished another of my Oxfam books. Tim Binding's A Perfect Execution was well written, engrossing and a realistic portrayal of Post-War Britain. I read it with enthusiasm but only moderate enthusiasm. I'm probably being stingy but, on this occasion, I feel that two stars about sums up my response.