Four hours early for an appointment! What to do? Returning home in rush hour traffic, of a sort, did not seem particularly exciting. So I figured out four hours of activities to the east of the city. In no particular order of dullness I went to a rarely visited supermarket and bought a new frying pan. Necessary because our old one had sprung a leak. Creating puddles of Rape Seed oil wherever it rested its bottom. Never having had a leak occur in a frying pan we had blamed Rape Seed incontinence on many other factors before noticing a steady drip of oil spluttering into the open flame of the gas hob.

The dogs then got two decent length walks, one on the coast path and one up a valley before they gratefully fell asleep in the car while I read a print edition newspaper and snacked on supermarket pastry. The hours had passed and I handed over some, still tired, hairy hounds to their canine beauticians. Freeing me up for some sea swimming and book reading under lumpen grey skies and no expectation of heat. Typical English Summer recalibrated from the Sunny Summer Sumptuousness of the past month or so. Four hours early for an appointment, no problem. British Summer Time has finally arrived, the rain chased me off the beach. Like any good English person I sat resolutely as the pages of my book darkened with blobs of rain, playing an internal game of brinkmanship, not wanting to be the first person to run to the comfort of a warm dry car. Not wanting,either, to be a drippy wet mess unable to balance on plastic flipflops made slippy by rainfall in a way they never do with saltwater.

Four hours early for an appointment and British Summertime has finally arrived.