Firsts

Every year, I make note of firsts; first snowdrop, crocus, daffodil. First sighting of someone wearing shorts. First sighting of someone wearing white summer trousers.

I knocked off a few firsts today. The first wild flower - a dandelion blooming on a grass verge. First snowdrop in the garden. First daffodils on the boulevard that divides the up and down lane of the main road into town.

And, to cap it all, first male in shorts. Not sports shorts, they don't count. This was an unfortunately ugly young man with a gloomy, receding-chinned face and heavy features, a thick mop of mouse-coloured frizzy hair, bad legs and even worse shorts, in an unforgiving shade of not quite brown, not quite grey. They flapped in the breeze just above his lumpy knees that were the colour of porridge. He had a very small brown dog on a lead. The dog wasn't wearing shorts. Pity.