Something In The Way She Rains

It was freezing the other day. I knew this because no less than three different (and completely unknown to me) people told me this:

First Person (at the bank): Freezing the day, eh?
Me: Oh aye.

Second Person (at the hospital. No, nothing serious): It’s pure freezing, don’t you reckon?
Me: Oh aye.

Third Person (at the chip shop): Pretty cold out there!
Me: Oh aye. Should get one of those things up there I reckon (I point at what looks like an electric bar heater on wall).
Third Person: (Gives me shifty look, looks up at the ‘heater’ which I now gather to be in fact a fly zapper, then looks away and shakes head slowly).

In the third instance, I managed to get away without any physical injuries, despite having suggested to a total stranger that he go away and electrocute himself if he is cold. No Irn Bru bottle through the teeth even.

Of course the other reason I knew it was cold was that my fingers had turned blue. This is especially impressive when you consider the ethnic nature of my fingers (my current fingers were adopted after the ‘car door incident’).

It did get myself to thinking though. Why this fixation on the weather? Is it that strange British genetic implant that makes some people find the shipping forecast on Radio 4 alluring? Does it hark back to the pagan Stonehenge days when the sun ruled above all and that globe of fire had its own spin in determining our fates? Could it be, that at some time in the past, the weather had a far more significant impact on us? Did a Wednesday afternoon with sunny spells and scattered showers used to be an ominous sign that the God Thor was unhappy with his latest sacrificial offering of a stuffed goat in lieu of the actual virgin goat that should have been slaughtered, only Boadicea had taken a liking to it with its masculine and rugged features? Part of me wants to say that it is because we have little else to talk about, apart from reality television and how much blood can be extracted from a football coach during a live radio phone-in before he dies, but I fear that is to simplify.

Britain must have the most mediocre and boring weather in the world. It usually only lightly rains, and if it rains a little harder all the infrastructure gets royally fucked, so unaware of extreme weather are we. If it is windy then a few tiles blow off the roof, but cows do not get swept into the air and busty blondes do not run around ahead of frightening storms with scientific equipment and laptops with swirly Fisher Price graphics shaped to look more fanciful than they really need be. With the ridiculous cult of personality that we seem to have inherited from across the pond, we have even elevated to cult status Michael Fish, the weatherman so used to this pattern of banality he could not predict an actual storm.

Now I don’t mean to belittle the weather disasters on our beleaguered island, nor deny that it must be the work of terrorists, but it is not as if we are living on the bulging side of Mount Saint Helens (and if you do, you would do well to get yourself incarcerated for shoplifting or something, as the only people surviving that eruption in 1980 were prisoners). We do not have tidal waves or monsoons. We are almost as short on weather disasters as on natural disasters. No, that black cloud is not nuclear fallout from Dounreay power station, and that funny red coloured running thing is not a lava flow, it is a river full of migrating smoked salmon with dill. The rumble you just heard was the Dial-a-Bus going over a speed bump, and did not feature on the Richter scale.

I did once hear from a girl in my class - the house of whom kind town planners had placed near the lowest point of a flood plain on a spot which had probably in all fairness been known to flood for centuries as proved by a map of 1745 which designated the district as a “Beware Ye Flashe Floode For ‘Twas Terrible Afore” zone - that the water does not ring the doorbell and then lap over the step into your front room after blowing a brief raspberry at the single limp sandbag that the council provided you with, all while holding a clipboard, as you would expect in a British flood. Instead it bubbles up through the floorboards, which must be a bastard if you are playing Twister. Incidentally, why are electric plug sockets so low down meaning that only five inches of water will knacker them? Eh?

Where were we? Oh yes, we do not even get forked lightning except maybe on a leap year, and even when we do the newspapers have to reprimand us for doing foolish things like wearing metal-wired bras in parks. Apparently that was the reason for some girl getting struck in Hyde Park. I knew those implements were unnatural. We once had a blizzard, but then I still lived in Scotland then and the weather can occasionally be more fun. Glasgow is on the same latitude as Moscow, as no less than three Geography teachers told me, though as I had no idea where, or what Moscow was, this was lost on me at the time - it could have been a tropical paradise as far as I was concerned. The temperature did get so low though that it was two degrees away from freezing people’s contact lenses to their eyes (minus 34 Celsius, since you ask). Cheaper than laser treatment anyway.

In Britain, the tornadoes are so pitiful that one can come along every decade or so in a built-up area and overturn Mrs Lampton’s plant pots, cause havoc with the privet that had been kept pristinely pruned by her long-suffering husband, even with his back, and set off a car alarm that of course everyone ignored, and still make the National News, with voyeuristic saps from a fifteen-mile radius crunching up the streets all around with their vehicles just to get snaps of the ‘damage’ on their camera-phones, so that they can submitted to some news agency website that you, having been infected with that British Weather Curiosity Bug will even interrupt that one-hour-and-counting Facebook session of a Thursday afternoon to have a gander at. And then your manager finds you out and you come in the next morning to a note on your desk saying that you’ve been fired and all your belongings are in a skip outside which by the way is double-parked and has therefore been towed two hundred miles to the pound in Chester and you then have to spend the rest of your life dividing up your dole money between buying food and acquiring the equipment required to carry out your ‘eradication plan’ against the snivelling IT bastard who mumbles acronyms to himself and who reported your internet usage to the big man.

I can only come up with one sensible and scientific suggestion as to why the weather appears to be such an urgent and omnipresent topic. I believe there are a significant number of people in this country who are soluble, and so afraid are they of getting caught out, they cannot even risk migrating to a less damp place. If this is the case, I think the government should intervene. They probably know the whereabouts of these Solubites. The government always has more power than you think – take Stalin’s attempts to have crop-dusting planes spray the clouds with Amazing Chemicals if rain threatened to dampen some victory parade or other. Mind you, with our joined up government, one department would sanction the use of cloud-busting planes, and the other department would have them shot down onto a residential area shortly after.

But Solubites are demanding of our attention. Of course you haven’t seen them leaning against doorways with their coffee cups. What if it rains? But they are there, and their plight is real. There can be little more harrowing than walking down the street with your friend when all of a sudden it starts drizzling and he grimaces slightly before fizzing up like an Alka-Seltzer. And isn’t there an antidote? I’m sure there is something you could mix in with little dearly departed puddle-of-Johnny that will at least let the important bits of him stick as deposits to the inside of a conical flask. Then there is just the small matter of some sellotape and a skateboard to restore full mobility, and we can work on the verbal communication and the aesthetics later. Incidentally, if a friend of yours does melt into a viscous pool, do not store their remains in your fridge in an empty peanut butter jar with its label still on. I speak from experience.

If anyone has any other answers (though I reckon I have hit the nail on the head), I’d like to hear them. Now beware of that frost underfoot.

Bugger me, it’s that totally unnecessary third-person bit again:

Kiran is now in full-time employment as a Data Entry clerk. As of next week anyway. This will suit his beaten-to-death-by-engineering brain just fine while he figures out what else there is to life.

This was the practice session, conducted under armed guard:
10110100010101 Next,
00110001011110 Next,
1101011110 Damn,
Backspace Backspace Backspace 0001100 Etc.

He promises to try not to mail a list of every married couples’ pin-number to a statistician using the bog-standard post. Not even if it has an attached post-it note saying “Private and Confidential. Really boring list of no use to thieves” included as an added security precaution.