What a gloriously sunny day! Now that I spend four days a week locked inside 'The Bin' as the shop staff call it, sunlight is a rare commodity for me. What do you do on sunny days? I've forgotten. Well let's find out...

Sunbathing

I must admit, stripping off in these temperatures isn't a comfortable prospect. Despite the warm sun it's absolutely freezing out there. I remember when I was 14 years old I went on a skiing trip with the school to Austria. On the day we turned up there were young ladies stretched out on loungers grabbing the ultraviolet despite the mountain snow. All that reflected sunlight really did make a tan. I came back from Austria so tanned my parents didn't recognise me. At least that was their excuse. Nice try.

There was one time I was walking our dog along the old railway line. Although a wonderfully sunny day like now, the snow from the day before was thick on the ground. Out of the shadows it got quite warm, so I was walking along in a tee-shirt. A woman walking the other way in coat and mufflers couldn't believe I wasn't dying of hypothermia.

I therefore conclude that we need snow. Brilliant. Just when there's a fantastically sunny day in winter there's no snow to enjoy it. I blame the weather men for my heightened disappointment. Just when is this snow supposed to arrive?

Mind The Holes

Holes are very popular in Swindon right now. There's plenty of potholes in the road (there's a fantastic one, almost a cave, just off a car park in town. You need a 4x4, map, compass, and Indiana Jones along for the ride just to cross it). More to the point, half the main shopping street in Swindon is currently being dug up. Don't know why, they don't seem to be putting anything in or fixing stuff, just making lots of muddy holes. Perhaps they're after buried treasure?

You laugh, but Swindon has a long tradition of smugglers tunnels in the borough, and some of these covert trade links have indeed been found in Old Town, as scurrilous liquor merchants traded barrels literally right under the noses of Customs & Excise in the highly taxed 18th century. Even better was the Great Western Railway. Loads of stuff was put into cellars for safe keeping in 1940. They only found it when the railworks were being demolished in the eighties. Out of sight, out of mind.

I therefore conclude that Swindon is the site of a mythical ancient civilisation lost to human memory and very soon we'll see Nazi's and archaeologists going head to head in the race to find the beam of sunlight that points to a hidden secret every year. I'll keep a lookout, just in case I discover it first. The first clue will be a choir of angels in the background.

Oh, by the way, they did the car chase last light.