Well it's supposed to be Dream, obviously but I fear it may be Deluge given that the UK weather systems have apparently all slipped southwards and the jetstream is doing funny things, and with all this has come the interminable and torrential rain. Perhaps someone can explain all this to me as a sort of Idiot's Guide because I found this website last evening, while the rain was hammering down, and started to read, and watched the animation, but eventually decided life was too short for me to grasp the rudiments of weather-forecasting, so I went for a bath instead.
But I wonder, for today, would you all be so kind, regardless of creed or non-creed, to just send up an invocation or do a quick novena to Saint Scholastica who I have chosen from a seemingly wide selection of available anti-rain saints. She seemed to be the only one who didn't serve a dual role (ie anti-drought) plus when Saint Benedict of Nursia (that seems apt) was in his cell he had a vision of Saint Scholastica (who was his twin sister) on the night she died, heading towards heaven as a dove.
This seemed like a favourable portent too.
The thing is, this evening... and this seemed like a really good idea back in blazing, heat-wave-ridden March, the Endsleigh Salon is off to watch a plein-air performance of A Midsummer Night's Deluge Dream to be performed in the terraced rose garden at Hotel Endsleigh.
'Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents...
The fold stands empty in the drowned field...'
Goodness yes....just look how open and exposed to the wind and rain whistling up the Tamar Valley that lovely garden is...
Thus far I have lined up Bookhound's fishing chair, my fleece-lined trousers, several jumpers, boots, a fleece poncho and a plastic poncho to go over the top, my knitted Orkney ear flap hat and gloves and I may yet pack a tarpaulin or three. Oh yes, and sandwiches for the obligatory picnic and probably a thermos of soup, ready to hear Titania pronounce on climate change...
'Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
...as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which...'
I have also been reading and loving Angela Carter's Wise Children, the most perfect accompaniment for the total lash-up that is Melchior Hazard's disastrous Hollywood production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I have been in hysterics.
Which I will probably will be this evening too, but I've paid for my ticket and I will be there come rain or shine ...OK... if you could start sending up those pleas to Saint Scholastica now.
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