Saturday, December 12/2015

First rain day since we arrived three and a half weeks ago. No doubt rain needed. J goes down to walk lengths of the beach as usual but takes an umbrella. We actually have FOUR. Two mini ones we travel with and two larger ones acquired en route - last year not this - one in London and one in Rome. J finds them abandoned, sometimes in the middle of the road, wherever the original owner has given up as one blew inside out. He's very good at repairing them, which is convenient because we do have a history of leaving them on buses or in the tube. Jane messages that she has driven on flooded roads to the British base at Dhekelia to get a newspaper: "drains unheard of in Cyprus". In the evening the rain gets serious, with thunder and lightning, but cosy inside, where we're reading aloud from Events, Dear Boy, Events - a collection of excerpts from (mostly political) British diaries spanning the twentieth century.