It just feels too springy

Franz Schubert in Stadtpark

I am thinking that we are not going to have any more cold weather. I have changed the heating settings in the apartment and we can now have the terrace doors open during the day. Monika and Sissi are enjoying lying outside in the spring sunshine.

Because of Monika’s incapacity to master the relatively (I think) simple task of walking through the cat flap – if it is closed – I have to take the flap off for her or open the terrace doors. This year I am going to make another mighty effort to teach her – but when Muffin popped her clogs  she was 19 years old - and she had never learned how to do it.

Fiddling around with the various air conditioning and heating settings at the end of winter sometimes has dire consequences and provokes snow or ice storm -  but this year I am confident. It just feels too springy.

Next week I am getting our bikes serviced - ready for our annual attack on flab and unfitness. This is probably a forlorn gesture as in a month or so it will actually be too hot to ride during the day - and we are just not good at getting up early on weekends.

However – this time every year I am seized with the desire to really make an effort – and sometimes this feeling stays with me until summer actually arrives and I can lapse into a torpor as the sun melts the tiles on our roof.

Next week Cate will be in Algiers which on the surface sounds interesting - as before the French departed it used to be a vibrant cosmopolitan city. Not that I went there but I have read about it and seen films so it must be true.

However she has assured me that it is not now worth a visit – being dull and lifeless and stultifying. Sure she has only seen it from the inside of a taxi but I trust her judgment on these things.

Enough said. I will save myself for another trip to somewhere that I really want to see.