Whenever it rained when I was a child, my mother did something that seemed normal at the time yet seems quite mad looking back: she dragged the huge, heavy plants from the living room – the massive bird of paradise; the hulking clivias in their enormous tubs – out on to the patio so they could “enjoy a drink”. She came from the southern hemisphere where water was in short supply and, while she grew depressed every January and hated English winters, she never found rain less than thrilling.
Well, here we are in February after more than a month of what the Met Office is delicately calling the “unusually southerly jet stream”, what Shakespeare neatly immortalised with “for the rain it raineth every day” and what the rest of us have been summarising with the sentiment “is it ever going to fucking stop”? I’m English, so talking about rain and its related conditions occupies 30% of my personality at any given time, but most of us have hit a wall at this point. According to the weather people, 26 weather stations in the UK set new records for the highest-ever January rainfall last month and in Aberdeen they haven’t seen the sun since the iron age.
