Precipitation conversation
The only really decent bit in Douglas Adams's So Long And Thanks For All The Fish is the character who's a rain god and doesn't know it.
When I first read the book I was amusingly entertained by the conceit of a man upon whom it always rains but for whom life has never been any other way. At the time I nursed the notion of being able to hold a similar kind of sway over the climate; of what it'd be like to shape the weather to reflect my mood and so, if I wished, making it pour down continuously during periods of evocative personal gloom.
More recently the fanciful idea returned, and I used to dream of what it'd be like to be able to command it to rain upon an area surrounding me a mile or so in diameter, specifically so that when I was at work everyone else would get really pissed off and the car park would be turned into a mudbath and the whole place would have to be closed down. Yes, I know. But I had to vent my fury somehow, and dreams were probably the safest place to do it.
All this has been brought to mind today by the fact that it has been raining non-stop in London for the last 12 hours or so. It's the first time it's rained here since I arrived, and as such has been more than welcome, although it's not been a particularly nice downpour (and that's not a contradiction in terms, believe me). No, it's been a dirty rain, not one that feels nice falling upon your face or in your hair. These kind of showers don't wash away frustration and fatigue and malaise, like they did in Liverpool; they merely layer them on thicker.
In other words, the wrong kind of rain.
When I first read the book I was amusingly entertained by the conceit of a man upon whom it always rains but for whom life has never been any other way. At the time I nursed the notion of being able to hold a similar kind of sway over the climate; of what it'd be like to shape the weather to reflect my mood and so, if I wished, making it pour down continuously during periods of evocative personal gloom.
More recently the fanciful idea returned, and I used to dream of what it'd be like to be able to command it to rain upon an area surrounding me a mile or so in diameter, specifically so that when I was at work everyone else would get really pissed off and the car park would be turned into a mudbath and the whole place would have to be closed down. Yes, I know. But I had to vent my fury somehow, and dreams were probably the safest place to do it.
All this has been brought to mind today by the fact that it has been raining non-stop in London for the last 12 hours or so. It's the first time it's rained here since I arrived, and as such has been more than welcome, although it's not been a particularly nice downpour (and that's not a contradiction in terms, believe me). No, it's been a dirty rain, not one that feels nice falling upon your face or in your hair. These kind of showers don't wash away frustration and fatigue and malaise, like they did in Liverpool; they merely layer them on thicker.
In other words, the wrong kind of rain.
posted by Alistair Myles at 10:25 pm
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