Studio Sixty on the Rainy Strip

Why is it that every single time I go away there is a heatwave in the UK followed by unseasonal bad weather at the exact moment that I return, and that the opposite is true for the country that I am visiting? While you were enjoying unprecedented sunshine (and doubtless the only period of good weather we will have all summer, so throughout the whole of the rest of this year I will have to put up with people consoling me as I look out on a rain-smeared windowpane with "remember May"?), I was in Washington DC enduring several days of Biblical downpours so severe that they played a cyclone warning to make people take shelter in their cellars. On the other hand, that was the exact excuse that I needed to blow off a couple of the less interesting-sounding museums I had on my itinerary and sit on the sofa for one entire day and a number of smaller subdays, watching the entirety of Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip on DVD with my dear friend the DC Diarist - which is exactly what I wanted to do, but wouldn't have been able to justify if the weather had been nicer. So in fact the rain was a good thing. A good thing, I tell you.

(Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip is excellent right up to the point where the makers start panicking that it's going to get cancelled and start shoving all the romance storylines to the front and resolving everything far too quickly and making knowing script remarks about how a pregnancy in peril storyline is the best way to bump up ratings just as they use a pregnancy in peril storyline to bump up ratings. A knowing cliche is still a cliche.)

I know you want to know more about my holiday than what I watched on TV but the thing is that it was a holiday and part of the holiday was that I wasn't writing anything at all the entire time I was there, and writing about it now feels a bit like retrospectively intruding on it, whereas writing about the TV I saw there just feels like writing about TV like I usually do. But I did have a lovely time.