Rain. How unusual.

 

Hellhounds and I took a turn by Soggy Bottom today to see how it’s, um, flowing . . . and the personhole covers over the storm drains have been shoved off by the pressure of the water driving up through the inadequate apertures.  It’s almost as good as a play, or it would be if we didn’t live here:  the little round-headed jets of water boiling up through the holes, and this great wave sluicing out through the gap where the personhole cover has lost its place.  Three of these rush together with the naked overflow from the ditch and, well, hurtle down Soggy Bottom toward the raging torrent that used to be a ford over a quiet little Hampshire stream that the locals call a river.  If I’d been in wellies rather than All Stars* I might have been tempted to leave hellhounds dry-footed in Wolfgang and slosh down in that direction and see how far I could get.  The lake by the Gormless Pettifogger is deep enough that the person approaching as Wolfgang and I paddlewheeled through stopped, apparently aghast, at his shoreline . . . and turned around.  Oh, come on, it’s not like you’re driving a Ferrari with zero-point-four inches clearance.**

It rained today.  Of course.  It’s Tuesday.  It rained yesterday.  Of course.  It was Monday.***  It’s going to rain tomorrow.  Of course.  It’s Wednesday.

HAVE I MENTIONED RECENTLY HOW TIRED I AM OF RAIN?

* * *

* Well I wouldn’t be in wellies rather than All Stars but I used to have a spare pair of (ordinary black^) wellies that lived in the, ahem, boot.  It occurs to me to wonder what I’ve done with them.  Maybe I’ve just forgotten giving them to the itinerant mage in exchange for . . . for . . . well, I certainly didn’t trade them for a rain stopping charm.

^ From the days when you could only get black or child-of-the-earth green wellies

** I saw an SUV—the kind you need a stepladder to get into—turn around at the edge of a large puddle some time recently.  I laughed so much I nearly ran off the road.^

^ She’d probably heard the rumours that giant squid from the centre of the earth were using southern England’s floods to lurk in wait for their favourite snack, SUVs.  No, no!  Relax!  It’s a ridiculous rumour put about by people who don’t have anything better to do than retweet silly urban myt—SLURP.

*** Monday had even less to recommend it than the rain.  I got to Nadia’s and discovered she wasn’t teaching this week either.  ::Sobs::  I wrote it down wrong in my diary;  I knew she wasn’t teaching last Monday, but this Monday I thought if I didn’t hear it meant she was, when it was if I didn’t hear she wasn’t.

Fortunately I had hellhounds with me so throwing myself off a cliff^ wasn’t a good plan because neither of them can drive Wolfgang to get themselves home.^^  So we went to the farm supply shop and bought compost and fertilizer^^^.  I was wearing singing-lesson-day clothes, not going-to-the-farm-store-in-the-rain-day clothes#.  I considered asking one of the stalwart young men to heave the nasty bags around for me but while, generally speaking, I’ve got over the extreme feminism of my youth when asking a bloke for help was SELF BETRAYAL##, I still occasionally get all tough/stupid  virago with bare-able teeth and (metaphorically) bulging muscles.  I slung the frelling bags myself.  And while I managed to keep my cute little cropped cardi safe, my jeans were goners.

And then I destroyed another pair of jeans today, getting the blasted bags up the stairs### to the greenhouse ARRRRRRRGH.  This shouldn’t happen at home.  I have a lovely pair of gardener’s chaps, which snap over your belt and around your legs and heroically repel mud (and thorns).  But in one of the monsoons of the last few months, when the rain was not only coming in sideways but from a funny direction, EVERYTHING IN THE GREENHOUSE GOT SOAKED.  Which I didn’t realise till later.  I’m still unearthing little quagmires in corners arrrrrrgh.  The chaps are still drying out.  I think they’re resuscitate-able.  Please.  I have no idea where I bought them and google is not forthcoming.

^ Which are in short supply in most of south-central England.  At the old house when circumstances conspired I used to threaten to drown myself in the pond, of which we had two, and both Peter and Third House have ponds here.  But somehow drama-queen drowning doesn’t hold the appeal it does when not drowning is a daily goal and preoccupation.+

+ Dentist from R’lyeh has been driven out of his large glamorous multi-storey office by floodwater.  I’m not laughing ::mrmph:: really I’m not ::MRRRMMFFFF::  Being from R’lyeh and all you’d think he’d be fine with a spot of drowning, wouldn’t you?

^^ They like the central heating+ and the soft bed out of the rain.  THE FOOD DOESN’T INTEREST THEM AT ALL.

+ Or the Aga

^^^ Which is to say cow crap.  Organic cow crap.  I prefer it to chicken—which is the other common commercially-available one+—because it smells less.  I admit I don’t know how the plants feel about it.  They’d probably say they were missing an essential element without the pong.  Like dogs adore tripe.  TOO BAD.  I don’t know how long I can go on with Pav’s dried pigs’ ears either.  She doesn’t eat them fast enough.

+ When I had a horse we made our own critter-crap fertilizer and it was lovely.

# I have enough trouble fighting with my wardrobe every morning.  I get dressed once.  I do not change for anything less than serious festivities that include Taittinger’s or the Widow, and not merely Prosecco.

## I don’t entirely fault my young self for this attitude.  Back in the early 1800s or whenever it was I was young, blokes offering, or responding to requests for help tended to do it with a gloss of patronage.+  Men have died for less.  I would know.

+ Not that this doesn’t happen now.  But either it happens less, or I hang out with a better class of bloke than I used to.

### The only young man who lives on my cul de sac is slenderer and more willowy than I am and so far as I can tell he doesn’t do the adrenaline-rage thing that enables slender willowy people to do things they can’t.  I wouldn’t be so unkind as to ask him to help me with large muddy bags of compost and other even less salubrious substances.