Oh dear, back to a rainy British summer. But there is a promise of sunshine tomorrow.

Yesterday, the rain teemed down from the heavens. I had paperwork to process, bills, that is what I mean, but I found out that Jane Austen’s last abode was ten minutes away in Hampshire. Strewth, I thought, the greatest female writer of all time, as far as I am concerned, lived a stone’s throw away from the Old Rectory. So I chucked Domino in the car, and off we went to find Jane. Forget the paperwork.

I am not going to regurgitate information that I researched after my visit. I am going to tell you how it really was, as I found it.

Well the weather when I arrived was foul. I was wearing a waterproof. Very unattractive. My hair was damp and dishevelled. Very unattractive. I was wearing flip flops. Very unattractive. I don’t think that Jane would have cared in the least. She was a flipping feminist after all.

I saw her abode across the street from my car. No major carpark and officials managing me to park miles away – like some National Trust properties. I just parked my car on a street nearby, and walked over to her house, which from the outside looked pretty and substantial.

But inside it was very insubstantial. Downstairs, three very basic rooms. Upstairs the same. Out the back, a cookhouse. It was a facade to grandeur, but the inside was modest.

A guide told me that her father was a clergyman. No doubt they didn’t have a lot of cash. A local, childless, gentry family liked the look of them and adopted Jane’s brother Edward, and he became an aristocrat overnight. Like winning the lottery. He took possession of the manor down the road, Chawton Manor.

Jane and Mum and sister lived down the road in a modest dwelling, the cottage which I walked around in three minutes tops. Not a lot to admire. Not like the manor down the road that her brother was given by the Knights that adopted him.

And let’s consider Jane, living there in the last quarter of her life (she died at 41) writing masterpieces in modesty. No wonder she came up with so many stories about women being subordinate to men in practicality,  not of course in reality. Women are, of course, the equal to men. And they have babies. Without women, the human race is extinct. Well without men, the same is true. The truth is they are completely equal.

Murray won Wimbledon for the second time this year. Poor lad, I think he cried because he proved that it wasn’t a fluke. Theresa May is now our second female Prime Minister. She is also not a fluke, but a godsend. Thankfully she didn’t cry. Because she would have been ridiculed. But if she cried, who cares. Both men and women cry. David Cameron almost lost it when he was leaving No. 10. I don’t get the stereotypes. Who is best for the job? That is what matters.

I am worried though, about Jane. Why am I worried. Because, although she was the greatest female novelist that I know of, she was poor. She initially wrote, so the guide told me, under the name of ‘The Lady’. She relied on her ‘lottery’ brother’s good fortune when he was adopted. Thank God he was really. Or Jane would have been destitute possibly.

I am glad that so many lovely films have been made based on her novels. And dear Colin Firth, his career may not have flourished as it has, if he had not emerged from the pond in Pride and Prejudice – where his shirt clung to his chest – the wet t-shirt look.

The nation swooned. But this time it was a man, in a period drama!!!

Today, I think that the weather is rubbish again for the whole day. I hope that this is not the case. But I can’t complain, because every time that Jane had to walk to her lottery brother’s house, she didn’t have Crocs, plastic shoes, but satin shoes that got wrecked. Thank God for progress and non organic shoes, i.e., polymers.