My baby loves the rain, it seems. She reaches out and tries to grab handfuls of it in her gummy paws, legs kicking in ecstasy. She looks up to feel the splashes on her face, straining against the straps of her buggy and rendering its protective awning solely decorative. I’ve stepped out to collect the kids and it is really pelting down. What began as a downpour is now a torrent and great big stair rods are pummelling the pavement as we make the short trip home.
She takes after me, clearly. I enjoy rain and the lack of it here is one of my main problems with London. When I tell Londoners this, they act as if I’m mad, but the fact is London gets about 106 days of rain a year. In the part of the Derry-Donegal border where I grew up, the equivalent number is 242. I didn’t realise it was something I’d ever miss. I certainly don’t think I loved it as a child. Rain was so ever present in my childhood that enjoying it would have been like enjoying air, or mass, or homemade country music.
And yet here, I gasp for it. My wife has no such sentiment and has become used to a furtive look I get when heavy rain occurs. It’s the same dart of unclean joy I get if I spot a caterer milling around with hors d’oeuvres at a wedding. I try to keep my delight to myself, for decorum’s sake, but I cannot. If I’m unaware she prods me, as if my favourite song has come on the radio, and watches me race – like a dog – to the nearest window so I can fawn at it through the glass.
On particularly heavy downpours, I’ve had to exchange ‘the glance’; the one that tells her I will be leaving my place on the couch to put my coat on and go out into it, whatever time of day or night it is. This I do, yelping with delight, while I presume she remains on the couch scheduling her many, and varied, extramarital affairs.
My son, unfortunately, takes after his mother (in his ambivalence to rain, not cuckoldry). As his sister and I laugh in the downpour, he glowers with revulsion. He is distressed by the discomfort – inarguable, I must concede – of having his body soaked by freezing water. I try to offer him my usual bromides about there being no such thing as bad weather, merely the wrong clothes, but he is unmoved. For one thing, I’m the one who sent him off to school this morning, wearing a corduroy jacket that is proving about as water-resistant as a trifle sponge, so it’s a bit rich coming from me. Not least since I am wearing the huge hydrophobic parka I reserve for my little rain jaunts.
Once we return inside I wring his corduroy into the sink, get him into his jammies and we all sit on the sofa under a blanket. I try to cheer him up by telling him this time next week, we’ll be in Derry with his grandad.
‘Does it rain as much there?’ he asks.
‘Not exactly as much, no,’ I tell him – and save that conversation for another rainy day.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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