Writing is therapeutic, it's like talking to myself...

When Made in Chelsea comes on, it's time to vacate the room and find something else to do. So I move

to the conservatory, if that's what it is, and look out at the wintry conditions. It's been raining all day and the

weather people on the television and radio are saying that two months of rain will fall in just one day,

possibly two. I can't remember. Either way it's been coming down all day; it was raining cats and dogs, as

they say, for over 12 hours. It was raining as I made my way to the office, as I left the Pop Inn and headed

back to the office, when I walked to the station this evening. We were allowed to leave the office early

because of the rain and as a result I was home early, at 6pm instead of my usual 7pm, sometimes a little

later. Right this minute the rain is hammering down. The annoying thing, of course, is that it's not the winter,

it's June. June 10th to be precise, it's the summer time.

It goes without saying that I was planning to cycle to work this week, except that I wasn’t really. I plan to do a lot of things, but I never, ever get round to it. All I have been doing a lot of is reading and writing. I’m writing now because I find it relaxing and, dare I say it, therapeutic. I don’t know why. It never used to be this way. Writing used to be a chore, it was work for heaven’s sake, but now - and I think it’s due to blogging - I find it to be a good way of chilling out. It takes me away from myself and the world around me, even if, like now, it’s really me talking to myself, it’s just that nobody can hear me; I am literally having a conversation with myself. 

I write in notepads too. There’s two on the go at this present time: One I bought in Tokyo and the other was given to me by a company called CombiLift. The latter comes complete with a biro pen. Sometimes I write in the pad first and then copy type the notes taken on the computer. On this occasion I’m typing directly into the computer, my new (ish) Chromebook which, incidentally, I would recommend to anybody. The great thing about the Chromebook is that everything is on the cloud. If I lost the computer or had it stolen, I wouldn’t lose any work because there’s no hard drive as such, nothing to store documents on; everything is stored online using Google this and Google that: Google Docs, Google Photos, Google Files. I might forget to take my laptop away with me and still be able to access everything on any computer, all I need is WiFi and that, I suppose, is the system’s Achilles’ heel: You need to have WiFi. But when am I ever on a computer without WiFi? Never.

The rain is hammering down. It’s a quarter past nine in the evening and oddly there’s no wind, just rain. It’s almost roaring, but the trees are limp, their leaves hanging down, probably weighed down by the water. That’s the weird thing, to hear the rain, but to see the stillness of the trees. I can’t see the rain either. It’s getting dark for a start, I mean, hold the bus a second, we’re only eleven days from the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, but it could be October judging by the look of everything outside. Eleven days to the summer solstice! This time last year we had a heatwave. It was so hot that I was having my breakfast in the back garden at 5am, sitting out there in shorts and a tee-shirt eating porridge with bananas, blueberries and black grapes.

There are no lights in the conservatory and earlier you might recall me saying - or in some way intimating - that I wasn’t quite sure whether I was sitting in the conservatory. What I meant was that it might not be a conservatory, it’s just another room that the previous occupants added to the back of the house. Who am I kidding? It’s not a conservatory and never has been. A conservatory is predominantly a glass structure, like a greenhouse nailed on to the back of the house, but I’m sitting inside a brick structure with windows. There are French doors and a huge picture window, in fact, there are quite a few big windows and they let the garden in, which is nice. In the hot weather, however, it gets very hot in here and I remember because I used to work from home in the heat, sweating like a pig. Do pigs sweat? Probably.

The worst thing about the ‘conservatory’ is that it’s one of those ‘anything goes’ rooms. In front of me right now is a clothes horse. It looks nothing like a horse, I hasten to add, but it is draped with socks and underwear and a couple of pairs of trousers. There’s a linen basket, a white, perforated, plastic container full of colourful clothes pegs, there’s a desk, a desktop computer, a wicker sofa, a bookcase and a green armchair in which I’m sitting. I can see the red glow of an extension lead under the desk to my right and that’s about it. 

There’s half an hour before the 10 o’clock news where the top story is the Conservative Party leadership election. Since Theresa May stepped down because she couldn’t negotiate an acceptable Brexit deal, the race is on to find a new Prime Minister, except that nobody is up for the task. Common wisdom has it that we’ll have a General Election before the year-end. The trouble is, there are no viable alternatives to what we’ve got at the moment, although anything but the Tories will do. Even Jeremy Corbyn! It might be quite funny to see what he does to the country.

The worst thing about Made in Chelsea is the idle rich it portrays. That kind of sums it up in a sentence. Why are people obsessed with the rich? Why does the world revolve around rich people? I’ve heard people say how liberating it is to have nothing, a bit like the feeling you get when you check in your baggage at the airport and realise that you haven’t got to pull a suitcase around on casters. You don’t see it again until baggage reclaim at the other end and that is liberating, until you’re reunited and have to lug it all the way to the hotel or back to your house.