What doesn't drown us, and all that...

Great Scott, it's wet in London at the mo.  My advisers tell me it's also pissing down throughout the sceptred isle, but I can't vouch for that.  It's always the way with the weather here: one minute it's as dry as a camel's chuff and the next it's hurling down stairrods and people are fleeing their homes for higher ground.

The rain over the last couple of days has been of that particularly viscose and tenacious variety.  Try as you might to cover up with oilskins and tarpaulins, you are going to get wet.  Getting properly sloshed on, like this, makes one feels weak and brittle.  Also, despite attacking them with blotting paper and talc, I cannot stop my trotters from feeling perpetually damp in this weather.  This is the most uncomfortable feeling available in a largely civilised society.  It's awful.

To add to the discomfort, Mrs O and I are off to Montpelier on Friday for a long weekend.  We've been to the south of France many many times over the nuptial years, and, believe me, when it pisses down there, it's does it with brio and reckless abandon.  So we're hoping against hope that it stays dry on the riviera for duration of our stay.

I remember one trip to Arles a few years ago when the heavens opened and they had 6 months' worth of rain in an afternoon.  Needless to say, the town struggled to cope.  The roof of the train station cracked under the pressure of water.  This shorted-out the lights and information boards.  Not that it mattered much, the trains had all been cancelled as they can't swim.  So that was that.  

Also, we'd rented a down house on the banks of the Rhone.  In the hours following the deluge, the river swelled to an alarming degree.  Huge uprooted trees, cars and the bloated corpses of unfortunate cattle swept past our holiday home for hours on end.  In the end Mrs O couldn't take it any more, and insisted we leg it up the nearest hill and check into a hotel.  This we did.  I had enough French at my disposal to explain that my wife "had fear of the inundations" and "could we have a room in the attic please?".

As it happens, the river didn't break its banks and all was well.  It was touch and go though.

The locals were annoyingly stoical and calm throughout.  They just stood at the flood defences for bit, staring at the maelstrom.  Then they'd have a fag and pull faces at each other.  Mrs O was beside herself at this.  "Who's in charge?  Where are the police, the fire brigade?" she'd ask.  "At lunch, I expect."

The Sun Has Got His Fez On

It appears that Spring has finally sprung in the old country this week.  The weather stunned us all by pulling its finger out.  In a massive about turn, it decided it had had enough of sh1tting down stairrods on the wretched inhabitants of the sodden island and would ease off for a bit.  And very welcome it is too, this wanton act of kindness.

The last six months has been bereft of seasons here.  It's just been a relentless one-act Kafkaesque production of warm-ish drizzle and low grey cloud.  The English are no strangers to sheight weather of course, but even they had had a gut full of this stuff by the end of February this year.  People would laugh ever so slightly too hysterically when the subject of the weather came up.  "Ooh, I expect the weekend will be awful" - cue shrill strained giggling and facial ticks.

But all that's behind us now.  One useful outcome of the battering we've all taken over the last few months is that expectations are at an all-time low.  If the weather broke now, and it didn't stop raining until November (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Eastenders), people would probably settle for that.  "Remember that week in March," they'd reminisce "when it stopped raining for nearly 95 hours?  Great days..."

As Henry Hill observed in the opening monologue to Goodfellas "...everybody has to take a beating some time."  Well said, aitch.

Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

I had occasion to cycle to Homebase en route home last evening, to fetch some new paintbrushes - never a joy at the best of time, this.  I go through paintbrushes like a chimp through bananas.  I can't seem to clean them properly, despite following the manufacturer's instructions to the letter, and buying the finest brush-cleaning chemicals money can buy.  They all turn into petrified slabs.  Anyhoo that's not the point of this article - let us return to our sheep: it was a grim January evening in east London; it had been vaguely damp for most of the day, which don't mind ordinarily.  A small drop of the wet stuff never killed anyone (with apologies to the family of anyone it did, however.) 

But when I emerged from HB, the weather took a turn for the worse.  It started to rain.  The rain wasn't heavy, more fat really.  By this, I mean the drop density wasn't high.  Visibility was good etc., but the individual drops were massive, like peanuts.  They seemed to be falling to earth quicker that the usual, smaller raindrops.  I realise this is a physical impossibility if Newton is to be believed, but my hand to God, it was the fasted rain I've ever seen.  Each drop carried such a payload that being struck by one actually hurt; it was like a small electric shock.

By the time I'd unlocked the bike and reattached the lights, the game was up.  I was soaked.  I shot home and jumped in the bath.  Also, the new brushes soaked-up enough moisture to keep them soft for the duration of the journey home, so not a wasted effort.