No, not wet: damp. I know there's been a spot of rain but I wasn't out in that. I'm just feeling
chipper because it's been so much more humid over the past few days -- at those times when it wasn't
actually bucketting it down.
(Do you remember the cigar advertisment with the wide-brimmed hat?)
I'd been wondering what the mechanism for up-chippering was: at first I thought it was just I was
feeling good about the lettuce on the allotment, but all this rain will have brought out the slugs
so it cannot be that; then I thought it might be a direct physiological effect, perhaps on the
lungs. But no, I see what it is now: the bike runs just that little bit more sweetly when the air is
damp. The tyres run even more quietly, even the chain is just that little bit quieter. Instead of
whispering along I seem to be almost silent. And the wind is that much quieter in my ears. Gliding
along, that's what it is...
- - -
Except, of course, for the damp-induced brake squeal. I nearly gave a pavement lemming a heart
attack this evening when he dawdledd off the kerb about fifteen yards in front of me with his back
to me and going at an angle of about twenty degrees to the kerb in the general direction of the
middle of the road. And all I wanted to do was to slow down enough to give myself time to be able to
squeeze between him and the pavement that he had just left.
He left the ground with both feet at once, and threw his arms up in the air just like a character in
a cartoon film that's about to be flattened by the approaching express train. It was magic.