Much nicer

The night and morning were punctuated with enough rain to please the garden. Then, shortly before I left for the shops, the sun came out and the clouds and rain blew away. The temperature has also dropped to manageable levels. My kind of summer’s day.

The rain, in fact, was so torrential first thing that I couldn’t hear the radio. I lay on the lounge, drowning in cockerpoos, and listened to the rain instead. It was a very welcome sound and I could almost hear the plants sighing with sodden relief.

Hot border flowers

But, as I said, the rain soon went and the blue skies came back though at a much more bearable temperature. I strolled into town without the profusion of sweat that has been accompanying me recently.

While at the Waitrose checkout I had a text from Mirinda saying she was coming into town to check out my hairdresser and would I like a lift home. This doesn’t happen very often so I went back to Starbucks for a second coffee and waited.

The reason she was checking out my hairdresser was because the one she’s been going to for the last number of years has closed. It was in Canary Wharf and very handy for a break whenever she was working from the flat. Then, out of the blue, she had a text from them saying they were closing. She decided to find a hairdresser closer to home so she could go of a Monday.

The trouble is, Mirinda doesn’t like many hairdressers. The whole process of finding a bearable one who doesn’t pull her hair is fraught with danger. Not for her, you understand.

So, she went to mine (I made her promise not to mention me) to discover that they wouldn’t cut her hair without blow drying it as well. She insisted that she didn’t want a blow dry, just a cut but they just shrugged. It seems the blow dry is included in the cost whether you have it or not. This only annoyed Mirinda.

She booked in for a colour but will still need to find a hairdresser who will cut her hair without charging for a needless blow dry.

Having had a long adult discussion about the ridiculousness of a business that isn’t there to please their clients, we went for a short shop wander in the Lion and Lamb Yard. Clearly influenced by me, Mirinda insisted we only go to Waterstones (where we bought a lo-carb cookbook) and Laura Ashley (where we bought a shade for the light in the stairwell).

While we were in Laura Ashley we wondered whatever happened to the Laura Ashley style we liked so much. The style that so matched Farelli and, presumably, lots of other women.

(My apologies for the high intellectual levels of this post.)

Back at home I made a batch of chilled orange tomato (that’s tomatoes that are orange in colour rather than orange AND tomato) and almond soup. We were first introduced to almond soup when we visited Andalusia. Mirinda had a bowl while we sat on the terrace at the Alhambra, overlooking Generalife and declared it absolutely divine. The recipe I made today is not, strictly speaking, a traditional almond soup but, still, it’s easy to make and is delightfully cold.

Mirinda settled down to work on her DBA while I pottered around. While editing past blog posts, I realised that it was a few years ago that we planted the hydrangeas in Carmen’s Sweet Escape. It was in 2015 then, the next summer the two plants grew and spread so that now they are big and plump and like a lake of colour outside my office window.

This is only two plants

And so passeth the rest of the day, engaged in important matters with a walk at Hankley in the late afternoon.

Most importantly, though, my soup was a huge success.

I’m quite pleased with the photo too!