The Old Country

Off to Ireland tonight for the bank holiday weekend, and even though we're staying with my parents in their new-build home, you have to pack as if you're off camping -  oilskins, sou'westers and a primus.  

They live in the west of the country, not far from the Atlantic coast, and weather there is famously volatile and violent, like Mad Frankie Frazier.  Even getting from the house to the car requires a change of shoes and distress flares when it's pissing down.  You don't know rain until you've spent a weekend in lockdown with two pensioners in a bungalow in rural Ireland.

It doesn't help that there's nothing to do when you can't leave the house.  Irish radio doesn't matters any either.  It's so bad and bleak, it's resembles one of Samuel Beckett's less accessible and least successful stage pieces.

Lurlled of weather

A week of many hues, this one.  Yesterday was a full-on late autumn day in Londres.  The cloud base descended to a height of about seventy feet, and the air below that was absolutely chockablock with moisture.  I'm not sure that it actually rained in a strict meteorological sense, but you couldn't walk the length of a dining table without getting sodden.  The air was saturated.

I went for a wander anyhoo, my usual route down to Westferry Circus.  It was wonderfully desolate down there.  The office fodder were put off by the weather and it was deserted.  There's a lovely le Carré feel to the place when it's grey and empty like this.  I can fill my time simply to staring out to the river, pretending I'm awaiting a contact from "our man in the Soviet trade delegation" or something.  This kind of glassy-eyed time wasting gets me down usually, but not at especially grimy moments.  I did try to read at one point, to take the curse off my idleness, by the book starting taking on board water like shit dingy, so I gave up.

Today, on the other hand, is a sunny, warm and life-affirming November day.  The colours are superb, and I say this as a registered colour-blind person.  It's the contrast between the plant life and the sky that does the trick.  Decaying organic greens and browns seem to suit that cornflower blue you get in the sky in the late afternoons at this time of year.  I was always taught that "blue and green should never be seen", but this is the exception.  Everyone from Keats to Jeremy Clarkson seems to like the combo.  

Actually, why on earth did they try and teach us an orthodoxy of the aesthetics of colour using rhyme in the 70s, like this?  It's seemed as natural as learning the times tables at the time.  Now it strikes me as a lot bizarre and a little sinister.  I dare say Thatcher heaved that bit of the syllabus out the window as soon as soon as her skinny white ass hit the Parker Knoll in Number 10 in 1979.  Had she stopped there, I might have felt better disposed towards the dozy old sow.

Or perhaps not.

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."

Water Sports

I got monumentally soaked this morning on the ride in to work.  The weather has taken a sneaky turn for the worse over the last few days.  When I left the house it was grey and unpleasant-looking, but basically dry.  A mile into the commute and the heavens opened.

In fairness it's vee rare to get dumped on like this while riding to work.  People always ask "What do you do when it rains?" This question is predicated on the wrong-headed assumption that it pisses down 50% of the time in London.  Fact is, it doesn't.  It rains very infrequently, and when it does, it's in short bursts.  So the chances of catching the deluge full in the face on one or both legs of a 40 commute are slight.

Despite my years of empirical evidence as too the dryness of the region I live in, I, like many Londoners, find it amazing when hosepipe bans are announced.  The received "wisdom" among Londoners at times like this is that any shortage of fluid in the taps is due exclusively to leaky pipework that Thames Water should have fixed by now, and not to the climate being fcuked.  People who labour under this misapprehension get, understandably but incorrectly, hacked-off when these strictures are announced.  Some belligerent cockneys (yes, there are a few) even refuse to kowtow until the water companies crack and undertake the remedial works.  They demonstrate their ire at monopoly capitalism like this by washing their cars as frequently as those of us closer to the middle of the sanity bell curve brush our teeth.

I think the primary cause of this incredulity is the fact that it's so cloudy in the south east.  Drought areas at least benefit from unbroken azure skies and glorious sunshine, don't they?  That's the quid pro quo for not being able to raise geraniums.  It seems unfair and impossible that we who suffer so much light pollution from a low grey cloud base should also be denied the opportunity to splash about a bit if so inclined.

What were our geography teachers talking about when we were kids?  They insisted that cumulo-nimbus clouds held rain.  Not the ones that reach us, it seems.  They're shit, like old teabags.

Doesn't seen fair somehow.

Bike Riced

Mrs O and I went for a weekend away en vélo over Easter.  We popped our folding bikes on the train and trundled up to Cambridge on Good Friday to commune with the hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists who had made the trip also.  It actually wasn't so bad in Cantab.  The students are at home (the normal ones, at any rate), which helped a bit.  We steeled ourselves by spending the night there and heading off the following morning, a massive complimentary buffet breakfast to the good.

The first few miles were great; well-appointed cycle paths take you right out into the mercifully-flat Cambridgeshire countryside.  It's quite dull, the landscape here, but good for low-octane cyclisme.  The trouble only starts when you get to Essex.

The physical geography of Essex is the absolute inverse of Cambridgeshire's.  The whole county appears to have been corrugated by a malevolent god.  It was massively hard going.  Mrs O had planned this first day to be 35 miles of bucolic bike jollies.  Five and half hours later, we pitched-up in Great Dunmow, utterly broken.  We must have cycled closer to 55 miles, what with the peaks and troughs.  As a consequence of this unforeseen extra effort, we spent the evening eating and drinking with abandon.  That's the quid pro quo of arduous cycling, and one of the pasttime's joys of course.  

After a mighty chug of Chenin Blanc and a slap-up Vietnamese dinner, we both slept like sedated babies, and lept out of bed, ready for the miles ahead.  Unfortunately, the weather undid us.  Literally as we were leaving the carpark of our hotel, Mrs O detected a spot of rain.  It then opened-up for ooh, let's see, the next nine hours solid.

The plan had been to ride all the way home, but by the time we reached the quaint end of the Central Line, I hoisted the white flag.  We jumped on a tube and headed to my sister's house, which is nearby.  We threw ourselves on her mercy.  She did the needful and filled us up with tea and hot cross buns.  She popped the tin hat on it by then offering us a lift home.

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.