08.10 Silly job titles, UK

I haven’t gone off on a rant lately but tonight I am feeling the need :-) I have been thinking about writing a post about silly job titles in the UK for a while, as this is one of my pet hate and I as a foreigner have been watching this growing trend here in the UK with a mix of amusement and horror. When I moved to London 12 years ago, I got a bit bewildered by all the fancy job titles people seemed to have here. Just about anyone I got in touch with in the beginning was called officer this and officer that. Now, I am not unfamiliar with the term officer; my father was an officer in the army, and I spent my childhood and part of my teens in various garrisons together with my siblings and my parents. We moved often, as army people do, and we used to live in the officer’s accommodation together with the other officer families. So I knew very well what an officer was when I left Norway and moved to the UK – I thought.

04.10. Hurricane and snow!

The mini heat-wave we had last week is well and truly over, but when I went to the hospital today I got a glimpse of the headlines of today’s newspapers, and they all wrote the same; about this coming week-end’s weather. If you don’t live in the UK, the following might come as a joke to you, but believe me, this is no joke, it is supposedly true, according to one newspaper: Britain will be feeling the cold as the unseasonable autumn temperatures drop by 18 degrees in just days and the tail-end of Hurricane Ophelia batters Scotland and the North of England. In the South, widespread frost will have the weekend's beach-goers wrapping up in scarves while storms and even snow lash the North!

01.10. October heat record!

OK, so now it’s official; we broke the temperature record today! The record has been broken for the highest temperature recorded in October in England - now at 29.9C. It was set at 14:42 BST in Gravesend, Kent, beating the previous record of 29.4C recorded on 1 October 1985, in the small town of March, Cambridgeshire. Temperatures in England topped those in Athens, Los Angeles and Barcelona today. In my garden however, it was 31 degrees at 3 pm today, making it a rather hot and sticky environment for my planned gardening.

30.09. September heat wave

Last day of September today, it’s almost unbelievable, as I have been in my garden for most of the day and it was 30 degrees out there in the afternoon!  We are experiencing some very unusual warm weather at the moment, not that it hasn’t been warm in September before; it has - and it is quite common with a spell of warm weather sometime in September, but not 30 degrees, and not for such a long period as we have had now.

26.09. Amazing weather

Some great things are happening in my garden! Well, they aren’t happening all by themselves, I am the one doing the stuff, but it’s beginning to look great, if you know what I mean! I have been meaning to do a big redesign of the beds in my garden, and after a whole summer of practically no gardening at all due to my recent operation, I am just itching to get started. It is a bit too soon after my operation to do anything major work, but with all the good weather we have had lately, I just could not help myself, I just had to give it a go :-)

18.09. The front garden

Hi, Sunday again and another week has gone, I didn’t intend for this to become a weekly blog, but the days are flying past me faster than I can catch up so this blog writing will have to be as and when these days. According to the weather forecast, the whole week-end was supposed to be a wash-out, and I didn’t think I was going to get to see my garden at all, but they got it wrong again; this time for the better :-)

11.09. Pruning Hydrangeas

Hello, I am still around, just haven’t been here for a while! I just realised I haven’t written on my blog since 1st September, and today it’s the 11th….not sure where all the days have gone, but I have done a lot of things since last time, more about that a bit later. Today we have had a whiff of summer, with 23 degrees and nice sunshine most of the day. It is just calm before the storm, literarily, as the whole of UK is expected an unusual windy weather tomorrow, especially northern England and Scotland. Autumn is definitely here!

01.09. Awful summer!

OK, so it’s official, it isn’t my imagination; it has been an awful summer! The statistics are ready and the cold facts (sorry for the pun, couldn’t resist!) are as follows: it was the coolest July since 2000 and with several chilly nights, in terms of minimum temperature it was the coldest July across the UK since 1980. August was even worse, the coolest August since 1993, with 25% more rain than average. I moved to London summer 1999, a so-called barbecue summer, with wall-to-wall sunshine from June to September and 25-32 degrees most of July and August. I thought that was how the weather was in London in the summer. How wrong I was! With 18-20 degrees and overcast most of August and rain half of the days this summer, we had better days in March! Last time we had a really good summer was in 2005. That’s a very long time ago…