The summer of suck

Still raining. It's getting rather boring now. I suspect most of the press is getting fed up too: witness this OTT front page from The Sun (this angle was in various papers on Wednesday). Still, thank God nowhere important, like London, is underwater.

For reasons of etoliation, I find myself thinking of 1816: the year without a summer. Whereas much of southern Europe now swelters under the oppressive heat, whilst we sit here damply sullen, that was a year in which most of the northern hemisphere suffered equitably.

A few good things came from it, though. It inspired Byron's poem Darkness, some of Turner's more interesting stuff and, if you remember the genesis of Frankenstein (Byron, Polidori and the Shellys bored in a villa started a ghost story competition) the Modern Prometheus myth. Oh, and the first modern Vampyre [sic] story.

Whereas this year's bad weather is due to a complex set of meteorological circumstances (as far as I understand, the jet stream's fucked), the 1816 thing was the consequence of a massive volcanic erruption. And when you find yourself thinking about the link between a natural catastrophe and a well-known ghost story: it's a sign from the, er heavens that you really need to get out more. Or start work on a book about a random group of people who decide to relieve the boredom of being washed out of their homes by swapping all sorts of different stories. Don't think anyone's tried that before.