Objectively speaking, winter in Cape Town is not all that bad. The temperature rarely dips below the high 40s, and a cold day is one when it doesn’t make it into the 60s. Subjectively speaking, though, winter in Cape Town is miserable. It rains a lot, and houses don’t have central heating, so we sit around freezing and grumbling.*

What I needed to improve my mood, I decided, was some summer fun from the covers of 1921 magazines. I could pretend I was somewhere hot, hanging around at the beach**

or the pool

or fishing

or playing golf

or camping

or basking in the moonlight

or canoodling

or cavorting about in the altogether,

or just hanging around,

maybe at the summer house.

(Okay, these are not all ACTUAL wishes. I’m not much of a fisherman, for example.)

Lo and behold, I did actually make it to the northern hemisphere in time for the last few weeks of the summer. It turns out, though, that my image of Washington in August was a teeny bit romanticized. Life has been more like this

and this

than this.

But I’ve had a great time hanging out with my friends,

and even though I haven’t spent much (okay, any) time working on my manuscript

I swear that’s going to happen before the fall sets in.

But fall is weeks away, so let’s not think about it right now. After all, in the words of the #1 hit song of late summer 1921, “In the meantime, in between time…”

*Of course, I always keep in mind how fortunate I am compared to most people in Cape Town.

**If we were rerunning the Best Magazine Cover of a Woman Swimming with a Red Scarf on Her Head competition, we’d have some good contenders here.

New On The Book List:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie