We had some old friends staying this weekend and decided to laugh in the general direction of the forecasts and go for a walk in the woods. It was dry for half an hour, but then the clouds moving over our heads, and visible in the gaps between the near-bare trees, changed their scudding direction by almost ninety degrees. This was the starting gun for a predicted and yet sudden change in our weather fortunes. We turned at our halfway point, the 18th century Nore Folly perched at the edge of the woods and looking out over Slindon and the south coast. The rain came down hard, and then harder still and then the hail came too. The upside of such weather is that you don’t have to be cold and wet for long before you feel you have earned a three course Sunday lunch and hours spent reading the papers in front of the fire. Our kids are not yet at the age where such logical arguments hold much weight and so the Culture section of the Sunday Times was interspersed with cultural icons of a different sort, Lego and Power Rangers.