Friday 3rd June

That is the refrain we keep hearing, both here in Eymet about the weather, and back home of course from our politicians.  We have had some pretty awful weather over here of late; in fact pretty much all year so far.  It has been wet.  And here I should apologise to my English friends who have had to put up with miserable wet weather for months, if not years.  But here in South West France it really shouldn’t be like this at all.  We were down here full-time last year and had visited every Whitsun for a few years and it was never this cold, never this wet.  And what makes it almost worse is the constant stream of weather experts popping in to the Café and reporting via various internet predictors or Apps that though it might be raining today – it will be better tomorrow.  And of course, you guessed it – tomorrow never comes.  Or if it does it is rarely exactly what was predicted.  We have had only a handful of hot and sunny days so far and though it was freezing when I left Stansted on Monday morning and gales were battering the East Coast it was cold and wet here too.

And our politicians are just the same.  We must suffer just a few more years of rainy Austerity before the sunny uplands of Prosperity will be revealed in all their splendour.  Just vote for us one more time and we will bring you sunshine.  And just as the target for clearing the deficit keeps moving one year ahead at each budget, so the good times fade into the mist of the future too.

Anyway by the time you will be reading this it will be sunny and warm again here in Eymet, or so I am assured by everyone (and we will be one day closer to those Elysian Fields our Politicians regale us with too).  And the amazing thing is this confidence in the future is never dented by the reality of experience…..