We had to be in Stratford for most of the afternoon, and honestly, it wasn’t much fun. The rain set in fairly slowly, but it was cold, with a cutting wind, and the way the gulls and pigeons were hurling themselves around at the river and over the canal basin made me pretty sure there must be a storm coming in. Which there was: it arrived just as I was walking through town to move the car (because R was still stuck in an overrunning appointment and our parking slot was expiring), and made me very wet, very cold, and very cross. The journey home in heavy, driving rain, contending with poor visibility and numerous fallen tree branches, was unnerving as well as unpleasant, but 20 minutes after we walked into a warm house the air-fryer provided us with perfect fish and chips, and at that point things began to seem a lot less bleak.
This plaintive gull is for R, who’s heavily into diagonals at the moment. I haven’t asked why, because I’m pretty liberal about these things.
With the actual weather having been so foul this afternoon, I was especially charmed by Snowball Fights in Art, and I thought you might appreciate them too. If you do, I can’t recommend too highly that you follow Lev Parikian on Bluesky and/or Substack: his weekly newsletter is full of this kind of uplifting stuff.
