SUNSHINE

I was a bit early for meeting the train the other day, and so I parked up in a car park and went off to the shops for a few minutes, acquiring as I did so, more tat to cram into our tiny house for no very good reason other than I fancied having it.

The thing that I was after had become increasingly unavailable in recent months due to the company producing them going out of business, but, during one particularly distracted afternoon, I suddenly remembered spotting a copy or three in a particular shop a couple of months ago and wondered if they might still be there.

And so, having mentally committed myself, I headed there, fully expecting them to have been sold out ages ago, and that I would find myself staggering back upstairs without them feeling all bitter, twisted and disappointed, but at least with some of the allocated pennies still lurking in my own bank account.

This tiny retail adventure didn't take me quite as long as I thought, nor was it as unsuccessful as I'd persuaded myself it would be, either, as the items in question were obviously not as popular nor sought after as the tiny voice inside my head had thought, and so I headed back towards the car slightly richer and slightly poorer (if you get my drift), and sweating like a drain after the exertions of the many flights of stairs leading back to the car park.

The car was, by this time, rather like an oven inside, and I still had ten minutes or so to fill before my rendezvous, and so, when I realised that it was far, far too hot to sit inside the car on such a nice day, I noticed that the skyline around me was looking rather impressive and I was in a pretty sweet spot for pointing the teffalone at the sky and getting a few decent panoramas of rather a lovely day.

Later on, that day actually got even better, and I headed home to find that there was barely a cloud in the sky which, given that it was Derbyshire that I was heading into, seemed to be a rather unusual state of affairs and worth recording, given that it seems to occur so rarely.

Sometimes you just have to take a moment, get away from the screens, and watch the sun go down.

Already, by the morning, not ten hours later, the clouds had gathered and the skies had regained their familiar greyish hue, but for one glorious evening, the skies were as clear and as bright blue as I ever remember seeing them be.