One of the great cultural peculiarities of living in the British Isles is our intrinsic relationship with the weather. Close connections with the elements are not particularly unusual in themselves: just ask the Canadian farmer working to the coming of the snows, or the African herdsman carefully avoiding the full heat of the day. The relationship between British people, on the other hand, and the weather, is so peculiar because, for something that seems so innocuous and inconspicuous to us, we seem to spend an awful lot of time obsessing about it.
In that typical, middle-of the-road politeness so characteristic of the folks of these isles, the weather is drafted in as a filler in conversational lulls: “Doing much the weekend, if the weather holds?”, a greeting that keeps awkwardness at arm’s length: “Morning! Lovely day!”, and even yardstick for temporal musings: “This time last year was absolutely glorious with sunshine. Remember?”, and I suppose that in this respect, I am not immune either. There are, however, times when the weather gives up its role as bit-part support act and comes to the fore to take centre stage, filling every thought and even action and even dominating the news headlines.
Summer was over, or so we thought. Over the last weeks of August and well into September we soaked up what seemed to be the last drops of sunshine, enjoyed those warm, dry evenings in the garden with a civilised glass of wine and kept the shrubs and flowers well-watered until the air turned cooler, the evenings began to close in, the sky lowered and the rain came, as it surely would any time soon. But it didn’t. Everything seemed stunned into a becalmed stupor and, despite the rigging-like creak of the garden parasol in the tiny, infrequent puffs of gentle tepid breezes and the bustling appearance of a red admiral, nothing seemed able to prompt the weather into continuing its journey through the seasons, leaving us like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, “as idle as a painted ship/upon a painted ocean”.
The walk to work remained coatless; the extra loads of washing we were able to dry totted up the bonus sunshine hours, abacus-like, and the garden retained its summer livery, adding unexpected colour to our days and conversations but, rather than basking in our good fortune, we seemed to look to the skies with a hint of distrust and a tinge of disbelief. Surely, we should have had the first proper bit of seasonal rain by now? The warmth trimmed away all extraneous frippery and became our everything as we watched forecasts waiting for the change, it continued to guide conversations, to dictate what activities we undertook and when we did so; it filled our waking hours and disturbed our sleeping ones; slumber remained beyond us. The stifling air seeped in through the open windows at night and kept us tossing and turning so that when we woke in the mornings, we were as tired as when we’d laid down to rest all those hours before, until finally, one night…
Wakeful and restless, I was alerted to the change as soon as it began. The absolute, almost digital, blankness of the heat had left us with no aural reference points, an unbroken sequence of bare noiselessness, but then, sometime after midnight, the quietus started in gently, slowly, becoming steady and persistent while it shifted with the changes materialising all around the house, a readiness for something to come next, the loud shush of a needle tracking along vinyl in between songs of an ongoing seasonal soundtrack.
I lay there, wide awake now, startled by the change as the misty drizzle found its resolve and hardened into rain, a foreign and glamorous interloper that we had forgotten we knew, the distant cousin of tides and rivers, aquifers and tarns, descending upon us suddenly as a visitor out of the night, bringing a million showery stories from a thousand elsewheres.
I remained like that for a long time, listening to the rain as it simply fell, marking my hours of sleeplessness like a water clock, the tick-tick-tick of drips from eaves and leaves marking every wakeful second that passed through the open window and vanished into the night until eventually, my eyelids started to weigh heavy, my mind lulled by the now constant ssssssh.
Even as I fell asleep, the rain washed through my thoughts as I pictured it seeping into the bone-dry ground, working its way already to the rivers on its fly-by-night journey, re-energising, rehydrating as it went, dripping from the washing line in the garden, from the surrounding gables and branches, and from the last blackberries up in the hills. At break of day, the world outside my window would finally wake to a fresh reality, to the perfume of wet earth and a season made anew.
