Ah, Spring, finally

It's sunny, life feels good, despite the fact that I am stuck at my desk (which often doubles as a dinner table) for the entire week with deadlines pressing at my temples (to be poetic). It feels good to at least be able to gaze up from the screen and see the blue stretching above the roof tops, and pretend that I am not feeling nervous about it disappearing within minutes, like any Londoner worth his salt might feel.
You know the anxiety, the tremour of the soul when you see the sun in London? The 'Shit, I'd better put on my bikini and get out there while it still lasts!' panic, which results in white, pasty bodies on weak, early-spring grass, still wet from the melted snow. My early England memories of this are always accompanied with 'now I understand', when I remember the family I was living with getting a paddling pool outside and sunbathing on a day I spent sitting in my jumper and waving my head in severe culture shock. They looked like those Siberians who crack the ice and snow with their shovel, and dive into the freezing water with a look of delight on their faces. It's good for the heart. Only my heart was broken then (in 1993) with the thoughts of the lovely Mediterranean spring that was happening in my homeland, while I had to settle for 10 degrees, a paddling pool and prickly grass strands. Anyway my dears, 15 years on, I am used to it all, and loving it. Spring is here.
Incidentally, that's what my name means in Russian, for those of you who don't know. Vesna = Spring. BECHA in cyrillic.
I am off to Seville this week, for the Easter parades. The blog should revive then, as it always does when I travel. Await those photos of the mad Sevillanos in ku klux klan-like attire, vowing to la Virgen that they will be good boys and girls.