Rain, to state the bleeding obvious, is liquid water that has become heavy enough to fall under gravity. I personally like the rain when I’m safely inside, looking out through a glass window. But that’s another statement in the bleeding-obvious realm. Seven billion people probably feel the same way.
How often have we heard people say they love it when it rains at night; that is, they loved the soothing sound of the rain on the roof (quite a different thing from the sound of raindrops on one’s head, or on a cheap umbrella that can only take so much rain-drumming before it caves in; the emotion experienced in those moments is a far stretch from love.)
Worse, if one is bespectacled. Being the spectacles-wearing sort, I have often dared to dream in a drenching shower that some scientist might one day soon invent tiny eye-glass wipers much in the manner of windscreen wipers, which might offer those wearing glasses a modicum of comfort. To date such an innovation hasn’t, to my limited knowledge, appeared on the market. If it exists, I think I’ll be one of the early ones in line for a pair and doesn’t matter how much it may eat into my pension allowance.
It’s hard not to think of the term rain when it’s been around for the whole week. True, it’s a life-giver, I know. The trees and the plants love it and almost immediately show their gratitude by putting out new chlorophyll-glossy leaves, or fresh buds. But I think a week of it is just a tad too much for human capacity. It is here that we differ from the trees. They go green, we just get consumed by the voluminous sheets of grey above and see most things around in similarly associated shades (which may or may not have been initial inspiration for 50 Shades ...)
How does one stay positive given such bleak surroundings? I, of course, just put my head down and write off a column like this one. After all it has been said that when all else has been spoken about, talk about the weather. But not everybody gets paid to write a column so not everybody is likely to put the head down and start eulogising (or trashing) these heavenly, or nightmarish, events called seasonal showers.
Singers do what comes most naturally to them: Pick up a guitar or sit at the piano and compose a song on the rain; use the grimness to write positive, uplifting lyrics, set the words to a good melody and voila, you have a hit on your hands. Millions and millions of people who have been depressed by the rain in other lands hear the song, identify with it and rush out and buy a CD that they can play over and over again when the next rain-showers threaten and in this way stay positive themselves.
Otherwise, tune in to your local FM radio station, which, for free, will play a series of uplifting down-pouring rain songs. Radio DJs are not merely men who are adept at spinning discs for the pleasure of listeners, some of them are highly perspicacious and when a week-long spell of rain is forecast, they set aside their regular playlists, or interweave into them a decent playlist of rain songs.
And so, on the seventh day of misery from above, it was to the radio he turned: My prankster friend, Barney. And to his incredible good luck, got a DJ who was playing a whole hour of — not rain songs but — songs about sunshine. Telling listeners, in other words, hang in there, somewhere behind those grey sheets lurks that dazzling orb we call the sun. Motivation through music.
“It was uplifting to hear Katrina and the Waves doing Walking on Sunshine, Kev,” he told me, “before segueing into ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Sun is Shining’ and ‘Don’t let the sun catch you crying’ ...” And all the while my head was down, writing.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
