Lying in the rain

It was only when it was too hot today to wear my sweater that I realised ‘You know what? I’m wearing an awful lot of sweaters lately.’ Which isn’t really saying much, seeing as I hadn’t worn a sweater for about seven years, minus a short (or should I say skinny) interlude in Australia.

And this is the middle of the Dutch summer. Hurrah, I get to take off my sweater for one day, while I was forced to wear it on and off for months now. I didn’t even have sweaters a few months ago!

People always ask me, ‘so why did you leave?’ and I have always answered ‘the weather’ and then they laugh and I laugh and the question is generally over and done with (unless you’ve got somebody really persistent, or really bad at the social thing – which is often the same thing). It was an easy way out. It was a quick, off the cuff answer that didn’t take a great deal of thinking, or explaining. After such a long time away, though, I wasn’t certain if it was true.

Well, I’m starting to suspect that it was really a vital part of my departure. I have this memory of standing in front of this big window in my room at university (I lived on campus) staring out at the drizzle which hadn’t stopped for weeks and saying ‘that’s it, I’m leaving’. The memory continues with me then boarding a plane a few months later and heading out to warm, warm Thailand. Of course, it’s not a very accurate memory because I had already been out of university for six months when I did leave, plus that room (which was my nicest room in university) was a room I occupied in my second year and my entire university education took three years.

Still, sometimes it’s okay to stuff the truth in the broom closet for a while (just as long as you feed it the occasional crust and bit of water) and let aesthetics take the reigns. For example, when you get yourself a daughter and she says she wants to be a princess, you don’t really want to sit down and explain to her that princesses can only really become princesses in two ways, one of which is obviously closed to her in all our cases (unless royalty has started reading my blog, which seems unlikely because then directly afterwards there would have been a jump in other people reading my blog, as the paparazzi try to figure out why royalty is reading my blog) and the other which isn’t really inviting, as she’d have to marry a pompous ass – which is not all that unusual in all countries where women have to marry men, but royalty does have the added disadvantage that the royalty's pompous assishness is thrown all over the front of the tabloids.

Another good example of where the truth should be embroidered is taxes.

No, that’s it, no witty remark, no clever jokes about taxes. Taxes are boring and I’m not going to waste anymore time on them here.

So where does that leave us? I have no idea really. I think I can sum it up as: when the weather sucks, lie like hell to get somewhere where the weather is better.