Painting and writing in France

I drove up to Paris and back again today, six boring hours on the autoroute. Coming back was solid rain, is there anything more dreary than three hours of flip plopping windscreen wipers?
I tried to visualize something poetic or beautiful in the impenetrable oblivion us lemming plunged towards for endless kilometers. Nothing! The nearest image I could remember was this optical art exhibit at the Grande Palais this year, so I am putting it here to show me how uninspired I was today.

Well it had to come, somehow I had persuaded myself that because we had such a terrible beginning to the year, with weather I had left England to avoid, that the glorious summer would last forever or at least till I got bored with it. But here I sit in the downstairs office with the rain hammering on the glass roof over the staircase. I am writing because it is so inclement I have not got the will to wheel my shiny new wheelbarrow to the courtyard in front of the garage and collect the supply of logs for the week.

Not that I mind the rain, being English I am impermeable, it is just the mental adjustment I have to make to winter. I have often analyzed my poor reaction to the change of season, which I am forever being told should be one of expectation of its winter joys, frosts and sunny cold days and all that stuff, but in my seventy second year I feel as I did when I was twelve. I hate winter and just about all there is to do with it.

There we are my grouse for the year.

Lets have a look for a picture of sunnier times to cheer me up.

there thats better………..Muscat is just over the horizon.