Facebook Twitter Google plus Share Share this post Facebook Twitter Google plus close 8.49pm AEST11:49 23 min: My brother, Niall, drops me a line from the beer garden of Hotel Darwin to say the game is on the big screen... "and it's a lovely balmy dry season night.
It's 7pm on a balmy Saturday night in June, and I have just ordered my first Sagres beer in I Cervejaria, a restaurant in Zambujeira do Mar, one of the prettiest villages on Portugal's south-west coast.
The blast of frigid air sent temperatures plunging as far south as the Texas panhandle, where balmy 70-degree weather fell into the teens overnight.
It was a balmy autumnal evening when a man in British army fatigues approached Hazell's British-registered dark blue Saab as she was parking it.
The vineyards are on the rolling pampas, close to the River Plate, and enjoy balmy weather most of the year.
You can imagine that in the course of a not-so-balmy summer, one of Europe's biggest businesses suddenly went off its collective trolley and put out a confected set of figures – which, let me emphasise, were not checked over by its auditors.
Besides, he felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness, bought at the chemist's and taken away in the vest-pocket, and he compared the ecstasy it induces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas and rough drop-scenes take the place of real furniture and gardens balmy with the scent of genuine flowers.
When Art Uncut's attempt to bring the issue of tax avoidance to the Pyramid stage was met with a pretty brutal response, the silence from musicians was similarly overwhelming: to pipe up, it seemed, would threaten the weekend's mixture of blood-pumping hedonism and balmy reassurance.
The balmy weather predicted is in stark contrast to the first half of the week, when much of the country will be blighted by rain, wind and below-average temperatures.
The rally started earlier in balmy sunshine – a contrast to the numbing chill in Ferguson – in Crenshaw, a predominantly African American neighbourhood.
To an extent, the spirit of balmy summers and barmy fixtures past survives, even if Wigan Athletic have cancelled a friendly in Morecambe to fly to the United States to play Columbus Crew and the Pittsburgh Riverhounds.
