Across the pond

Yesterday I woke when the sun streamed in through the windows from a cloudless sky. Jumped out of bed to prepare for the long drive to meet up with my sister. But my barometer was falling and the BBC was forecasting heavy driving rain and high winds for our parts. So we stayed home and  I fixed my new £9.95 weather machine to the fence on the terrace.

By mid-morning it was whizzing around in gusts of wind and the glass tube was collecting rain drops. After lunch the sun had broken through again, turning the conservatory into a sauna, so we togged up and went out to do the walk to Golden Cap.

Tides of pleasure flowed through my veins as we strolled through the woods, delighting in the dappled pattern the sun was painting amongst the trees, and the white horses rippling the sea in Lyme Bay. As we neared the Cap itself, the wind was rushing through the trees, and getting at me through my overcoat.

Ah, bitter chill it was. (I didn’t write that line. It is poached from John Keats, who along with his chums, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, knew all about dawns that did not fulfill their promise.)

In nature. And in politics.

This morning the sun is blazing just above a threatening black rain cloud, as I hope you can see from my picture.

Which is the perfect metaphor for our present times when President Obama is struggling to fulfill his election pledges to the American people and to help Gordon Brown save the world from the bankers.