D:Rains

Well here we are again, another month, another blog. This one rather caught my typist by surprise, what with February being shorter than all the other months, though I did remind himself that he'd had a reprieve of one day because we're "enjoying" a leap year. I had to stop him writing a whole load of stuff about leap years, telling him that if you lot can read my Blog on the Village website then you can look it up for yourselves, but I couldn't prevent him sneaking in this "interesting fact" – not a lot of people know that as Michael Caine might have said! So he checked and it was not Sir Michael who said it but rather Peter Sellers impersonating Michael Caine – well not a lot of people know that! Anyway, interesting (?) fact: if the number of the calendar year is divisible evenly by 100 then it is not a leap year, only when it is divisible by 400 – yawn.

So what is interesting? – well my birthday for example, in the middle of last month. Yes, Valentine's Day, thanks for asking. Themselves being great romantics, they had gone away on holiday leaving me to look after my friend Finn and his mum Helen. Here's a picture of my birthday cake/chew which was gone in a second the moment she blew the candles out. What else did you expect? A Lab has a reputation to maintain!

So what I really wanted to talk about was drains – is it a coincidence that the word drain contains the noun rain, that the drain has to deal with? There's probably some grammatical phrase to describe this but it escapes both of us. What with the heavy rain themselves' drains have not been draining. The rainwater soakaways have not been up to scratch: performing the first part of the description perfectly, soak as in the garden getting soggy, but not the last, away as in no longer our problem. They were all clogged up with roots and stuff so some nice men came here to play fetch the tennis ball with me and dig holes in my garden to make it better. Well here's hoping! The weather has been testing their work, just a bit ....... so we hope as D:Ream (now you see why himself entitled this blog D:Rain!) used to sing that "Things can only get better". Which leads him to the next "interesting fact": the keyboard player for D:Ream at that stage was Brian Cox who is now Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy of Manchester University. Jodrell Bank Observatory is part of his department and part of Jodrell Bank is the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (another yawn perhaps?) of which one of the telescopes is just north of Paradise Lane, linking this back to Minshull! If you want to walk there it's very wet, let me tell you!

So there you have it. As always I'll keep an eye on local developments for you and report back next month.

Madai, your rovering reporter

PS: have you guessed how old I was last birthday?
PPS: answers on a dog chew to the usual address