Last weekend torrential rain provided me with a welcome excuse to ignore the laundry (no chance of drying it in this weather) and to disregard the garden (unless I was to take up growing rice). I decided to do some work.
Talk about lack of resolve! Only the day before, I’d vowed to stop working at weekends. When you work from home, it’s too easy to switch on the laptop to check a few emails and end up lured into other, more time-consuming tasks. One thing leads to another – and before you know it, the day is gone.
But this time, it wasn’t to be. I started tapping away at the keyboard, but the screen would barely respond. That irritating on-screen egg-timer kept popping up, slowing down my progress down to a snail’s pace (albeit a snail with touch-typing skills).
It wasn’t my computer that was at fault, unlike my husband’s laptop. He’d immobilised it the night before in an unscheduled scientific experiment. He proved conclusively that a keyboard and a glass of wine don’t mix. It’s still drying out in the conservatory.
To rest my eyes from staring at the locked screen, I gazed out of the window at the hammering rain. And then it struck me: the weather was slowing down the internet. The local weather report revealed 97% humidity. With that much rain in the air, no wonder the signals couldn’t get through.
I logged into Facebook (slowly) to ask whether any of my friends were having the same problem. Eventually, some answers crawled back to me: y…e….s, w…e a…r…e.
Well, no more work for me then. I declared I’d take the rest of the day off. What a welcome change from the usual English summertime cry of “rain stops play”. In my case, rain was stopping work.
And then I realised why the weather was quite so bad: it’s only a week till the start of Wimbledon.
(This post was originally published in Hawkesbury Parish News, July 2011).
