Right as Rain

Right now in Britain what on earth can be right about rain? I understand that if you live in a drought-stricken nation rain is just the ticket (what does that mean, by the way?), wholly desirable and a God-send when it turns up. However, here in Britain, right now, that's just not the case, is it?

 

Right as rain: the phrase popped out of my mouth the other day and set me thinking, pondering on its meaning and origins. (I'm like that with words.)

 

Right as rain! I looked it up in 'Brewers'. There were a number of entries about rain. Some were more relevant than others.

 

'It never rains but it pours.' True! Very true! An 18th century proverb, apparently. Very shrewd these 18th century guys - and gals.

 

'To put something by for a rainy day.' Well, the day has come! Time for a spending spree!

 

'To rain cats and dogs.' A seafarer might have used the expression 'The cat has a gale of wind in her tail' when a cat is unusually frisky, so Brewer's tells us. The dog, Brewer says, is a signal of wind, like the wolf, which were both attendants of Odin, the storm god. 'So the cat may be a symbol of down-pouring rain and the dog of the strong gusts of wind accompanying a rainstorm.' I thought Brewer said the cat was something to do with wind, not rain... oh, well, never mind. Anyway, we've had plenty of both lately.

 

'Rain check.' This has something to do with a ticket that was given in the USA, entitling one to see another baseball game when the one you had a ticket for was cancelled because of rain. OK. They could be issuing a lot of those these days. But certainly no-one needs to check if it's raining.

 

OK, Brewer's, thanks for the explanations.

 

But 'right as rain'? How can this be? How can rain be 'right' - or 'wrong'? Well, I can see a whole lot more reason for it being wrong right now, especially in Somerset, Berkshire and a few other places. With sodden ground, flooded streets and homes, overflowing gutters and wrecked sea defences, what on earth do we need more rain for? And how can it possibly be 'right'? The only guess I can make is that rain might be described as 'upright', i.e. coming straight down. In the Netherlands rain comes in 'rods', not bedraggled moggies. Again a picture of rain coming down forcefully in straight lines. Although, actually, recently the rain in Wales has been more diagonal or horizontal than vertical. The neighbour opposite has a tall, thin conifer in his front garden which, after being battered by the winds, has finally been left as a long-lasting testimonial of the direction in which both wind and rain came these last few days and weeks. 

 

So the mystery remains. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has let me down for once. Can anybody help?

The Right Attitude to Rain

My title is nicked! I admit it without shame. It belongs to a book by Alexander McCall Smith that I hoped would provide me with a little wisdom. I was attracted by its title which turned out to have no discernible connection with the storyline or debate held within its pages. Maybe I missed something. I am fascinated by weather of all shapes and sizes. My blogs are full of it. Apologies to those who do not share my obsession. However, it is a part of my English heritage that I cannot shake. I am sitting today with a view out of my window over the Welsh hills. The hills are beautiful: not craggy, but escaping domesticity by their sharp outline and steep inclines. But they are not the primary object in view today. Today I am seeing, with some regret, the rain. It pours incessantly down, tainting everything around me with a greyish tinge and a misty quality. The earth is already saturated and the footpaths are caked in mud. It is a Romantic artist's dream but it just isn't doing it for me today. I am reaching the end of my tether with its drabness, wetness and depressing permanence.

 

I am a newcomer to Wales and well aware that Wales can be wet. Of course it's wet. We are slap bang in the course of the warm, wet Westerlies! Blessed with a hot, dry (short) summer, we were lulled into a false sense of security at first, but we knew in our hearts that this was beginners' luck and that the rain would surely come. And come it has. We can comfort ourselves that in this freak winter the whole country is sharing our misfortune this year and some with far worse consequences than ours. However, we know that this steady influx of dampness is normal here and it is no good being surprised, indignant or unprepared.

 

With this thought in mind, I picked Alexander's volume off the shelf with some eagerness, but found only the ongoing deliberations of its protagonist concerning the pros and cons of embarking on an affair with a much younger man. Not much about rain. Isabel Dalhousie can be relied upon to debate the rights and wrongs of moral philosophy in her life and everyone else's with as much diligence and enthusiasm as Mr. Cameron, although with less dogmatic certainty, but sadly she offered me no wisdom on the right attitude to rain. I am therefore forced, as I gaze out on an over-abundance of the stuff, to concoct my own cocktail of home-grown remedies. Having gone to the trouble, I might as well try them out on you.

 

Positive thinking is all the rage nowadays and very beneficial it can be. So perhaps it would help to dwell, if I can, on the positive aspects of rain. Let us begin by rearranging our vocabulary on the subject. Dull, depressing and grey will be scrubbed from the list immediately. No, rain is clear, cool and refreshing. It does not drip annoyingly down, and it does not flood. Rain pours, engulfs, forms white torrents, fills things that were empty, replenishes things that were in need, lubricates and loosens and, best of all, it goes with the flow... (It is harder to think of these things in a positive light when it is a chilly winter's day - better in the hot days of summer when dry and weary matter and people are in need of refreshment. Oh for those balmy days of summer...)

 

To continue, water must be thought of as a positive benefit... (This is a little tricky right now, with thoughts of unnaturally high tides, rising river levels, flooded homes and damaged promenades rise to the surface. However, the case is far from hopeless.) Just think of the concept of 'flow' alone. Where would we writers be without it? Gushing, pouring, flowing and over-abundance are transformed into heavenly visions when considered beside the ideas of thirst, drought, parched river beds, Water Aid or even writer's block! So, the right attitude to rain! I have done my best. I have tried to channel my thoughts, my vocabulary and my attitudes to the best of my ability. I have tried not to give in to the common mistakes of always complaining that there is too much or too little of something. I have tried to maintain a balanced viewpoint.

 

Are you convinced yet?

Life, Stand Still Here!

So, why do we do it? We wrestle with paint, clay or poetry to create that perfect design, that shape, that collage of textures and colours, or that perfect orchestration of words and phrases - why? What is it that drives us to agonise, to cudgel our poor overworked brains, to polish, to draft and redraft until we have achieved something as close as we can manage to the vision that lies before us, taunting us and drawing us on to create. We are artists, all of us, in our different ways. We create. It is in our nature. But why?

 

In her novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf grappled with this question of what it is that drives us to take disparate objects, colours, shapes or even people and bring them together into order, to create a thing of beauty. For Woolf, it is the bringing together of words that drives her. Mrs Ramsay, modelled on the author's mother, brings people together in the novel in a series of unforgettable moments and strives to create harmony out of the chaos of everyday life.

For Lily Briscoe moments must be made permanent on canvas. Paint is Lily's medium with which she transforms the fluidity of life to the fixity and permanence of art. Deeply aware of the struggles of her sex to count for something in the world that is more than the inevitability of romance, marriage, child-bearing and domesticity, Lily's work is her art. It is her reason for being. She knows that her efforts to master artistic form 'roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted'. Nevertheless, she persisted. 'Why then did she do it?' she asked herself.

Walking along the wooded shores of one of our local estuaries, fascinated by the wintry outline of the trees, the colours, the misty quality of the hills and the loneliness of the landscape, I ask myself a similar question. Why do I feel this continual urge to write what I see around me? What am I trying to achieve? What am I trying to prove to myself? What is it that drives me? The more one looks, with the eyes of an artist, at the world around us, the more one sees out there. Every day brings new discoveries to the artist. The trees are no longer just 'brown and green'. The lacy patterns of their outlines in winter are no longer dull and depressing, but infinitely varied, as they stretch up their branches against the subtle colours of a winter's sunset.

Painter, sculptor, wordsmith alike, we are all the same in our painstaking search for that elusive design which will make life stand still. Life moves too fast. Each moment, for the artist, brings fresh cornucopias of impressions, fresh bounty, a superfluity of beautiful moments to record. We are desperate to fix them on canvas, paper, stone, or whatever medium we choose, lest they escape. "Slow down!" we cry. "Life, stand still here!" But the infinite escapes us once more, finite mortals that we are, and we are forced to try again.

 

January Lament

January! How quickly the new year turns! The blink of an eye and everything is changed, at least in the subtle moodiness of our subjectivity, if not in cold, objective terms. The gloom descends, with festivities put away for another year, and all the talk of tides and floods, unnatural weather and miserable predictions of six months of ice and snow. Six months of Arctic conditions - surely not! But the mere thought of it is enough to dampen our spirits, darken our thoughts and allow into the corners of our consciousness just a hint of belief. What if they're right?

And for us literary types, steeped in the doom and gloom of the past, how easy it is to fall into step with the poets of yesterday and share all their miserable misgivings about the year that lies ahead. Maybe in our middle years, in the midst of a dark wood, we have lost our way. Maybe a waste land of ice and snow, as well as moral degeneration, lies out there ahead of us with the falling towers, crumbling cities. Maybe...

So happy New Year, one and all! Join me in a moment's mournful meditation before we make ourselves a cheery cup of tea and get on with putting the Christmas decorations back in the box...

 

Eliot's Lament

 

January! At a stroke

December's magic falls away.

Sweet-smelling hay,

Warm swaddling bands

And a choir of glittering angels

Give way to bleak midwinter.

 

Thirty-one days of leanness,

Marked out one by one,

The New Year's calendar

Empty, unused, on the wall

Where Christmas stockings hung,

Bright with hope and longing,

Memory and desire.

 

January! Harbinger of ice and snow.

No longer Christmas.

No more the bright Advent candles

Illumine our way,

Our festive days.

No! Sprung from the Virgin's womb,

A hard and bitter winter

One dark day at a time.

 

A birth and yet a death:

Gold, frankincense and myrrh,

Coming late to the party,

Borne by tall, dark strangers,

Sweep us onward, unknowing,

Toward Easter's passion

And the dark night of the soul.

 

Thrust headlong

Into an uncertain future,

We stumble in the darkness

Pause on the threshold,

Yearning, struggling, onwards

For those first green shoots of spring.

 

Yet, April may yet be the cruellest month.

 

 

 

The Holly and the Ivy

Crime is hereditary, you know. It propagates itself down through the generations and, before you know it, you're tangled in its creeping tendrils up to your ears. So, look before you leap and beware what you start. Spare a thought for your descendants when you stray from the straight and narrow. 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive' my mother used to say. How right she was!

She was a country girl, my mum: born and bred in a Somerset village and daughter of the village grocer. I have photos of her as a young girl, on horseback, riding jauntily through the heather with her sisters, high up in the Quantock Hills. It was a far cry from the London suburbs where my sister and I spent our childhood days. We were city dwellers and we never saw the country girl hidden deep in her heart until much later. In our teenage years we moved, with our parents, to a nicer part of London, close to the edge of the urban sprawl. We would make forays into the countryside at weekends and, there in the Kent countryside, it seemed, a part of Mum's old self was reborn. They would stop the car in a quaint Kentish village, full of tile-hung cottages and gardens full of old-fashioned flowers, and Mum would be off, strolling nonchalantly down muddy footpaths, bag in hand and a pair of secateurs hidden in her pocket, happy as a sandboy.

Secateurs? You should have seen her at Christmas! Dressed in 'slacks' and a moth-eaten old sheepskin jacket, with a headscarf knotted under her chin, she would drag our reluctant father down country lanes, armed with a walking stick and a pair of secateurs. Dad would be cajoled into doing battle with prickly holly bushes, yanking down tough branches with the walking stick whilst she snipped them off for her flower arrangements. No Christmas was complete in our house without jugs full of greenery and, behind the pictures, a sprinkling of holly and ivy that gradually shed leaves and berries all through the holiday. Country habits die hard.

Moving back to the country myself, after many years in the city, I am aware that aspects of my past are coming back to haunt me. Having spent summer and autumn days exploring river banks and country lanes in my new rural home, admiring the countless varieties of wild flowers in the hedgerows (and not picking them!) and helping myself to nature's handouts in the form of sweet, juicy blackberries and windfallen apples to fill the freezer, I am ready to enjoy nature's bounty at Christmastime too. All of a sudden, I am finding myself whistling merrily '..the holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown, of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown...' and a little urge comes upon me to supplement tree and tinsel, angels and baubles, with a little rustic charm of a traditional nature. Out come the secateurs, the bag, the jacket - no, not the headscarf! - and I am off down the country lanes to seek out Christmas past and follow in my family's footsteps.

It is a different kind of Christmas, rooted in the soil, in the country traditions, in folk carols and wassailing, figgy pudding and mulled mead and I am loving it! A Merry Christmas one and all!

Flat Spin?

 

My mind is in a state of confusion, it seems. I am imagining, in my mind's eye, a little Mexican in a sombrero, spinning like a top, round and round, almost hidden from view by his enormous hat and gradually disappearing further and further into the ground, soon to be flattened completely beneath his oversized headgear. Once, whilst we lived in the Netherlands, we went to see a wonderful concert by an international youth orchestra in a concert hall in Rotterdam. This must be what I am thinking of. Their party piece, performed with every ounce of their skill and application to the task, was a marvellous rendering of one of my favourite pieces of music: Bolero. Accompanied by a dervish gentleman dressed in a multi-coloured poncho, who twisted and twirled in time to the music until we expected to see him fall, dizzy and exhausted, to the ground, the music was intoxicating. We listened and watched, spellbound, as he whirled on and on, apparently caught up in the music, like we were, and totally oblivious of his audience.

 

Caught up in a frenzy of speculation, my mind moves on to an altogether different image: some kind of revolving apartment, maybe on London's Post Office Tower? Living in London as a child, I remember the excitement when the Post Office Tower Restaurant was first opened and one could spend an enchanting evening up there, revolving slowly over dinner and seeing the lights of London laid out below. Is it this I should be thinking of?

There again, I seem to see, this time from the distant recesses of my childhood memory, a game of cat and mouse, a cat and mouse chase, and a giant hammer wielded by the desperate little mouse, swinging round and round above his head and finally making contact with an annoying and troublesome pussy cat, knocking him clean off his paws, high up into the sky, round and round, spinning down and down until he hits the deck, in an elongated, flattened pussy cat shape on the floor - again. Poor old Tom cat!

It's Christmas! Most of us are rushed off our feet. This probably explains my unstable, confused mental state and the hallucinations which crowd into my overburdened consciousness. Presents to buy, menus to plan, visits to make to meet up with long lost relatives and a Christmas tree to decorate! Each of those fascinating activities we have grown to love since our move here: the art clubs, writers groups, choir, theatre group, ladies groups - the list is growing all the time - each of them has its own festivities for the season and its own pressures. Caught up in a whirl of last minute choir practices, performances in the local churches and nursing homes, buffet lunches where we all 'bring and share', writers groups where we bring not only our scribblings but an offering of food and wine, Christmas dinners, Secret Santa pressies to buy, we scuttle from one to the other in ever-decreasing circles - in a flat spin, in fact! I revel in it all but, as usual, there is too much of it. Flat spin - what on earth does that mean? I paused to wonder the other day and that set off a whole lot of thinking. These phrases do that to me - I just can't help wondering where they originate. Why do we talk of being in a flat spin?

Does anyone want to know? Well, here it is anyway! My faithful copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable reliably informs me that a flat spin is 'when the longitudinal axis of an aircraft inclines downwards at an angle of less than 45 degrees. In the early days this inevitably involved loss of control.' Nowadays, apparently, it is used in air combat as an evasive action. There, mystery solved and a clue to a possible means of escape from all this Christmas razzmatazz, should this be required!

 

Early one Winter's Morning

Not so early, really; it's getting on for 10 o'clock in fact, but there's a cold, fresh, silvery light in the sky, a mistiness over the hills and a fresh layer of white on the top. Maybe not snow this time, just a dousing of big white hailstones, but an indicator that winter is coming. No-one much about yet, adding to the feeling I have that I got up early. It's a beautiful day.

A woman wanders nonchalantly along the bay, smiling at no-one in particular, the jauntiness of her step bearing witness to her love of the outdoors and her obvious enjoyment of this pretty, silvery morning. She disappears into the distance, gaily swinging her arms, as the hailstones return and soak her brightly coloured coat and cosy ankle boots. We're used to weather here. No use trying to avoid it. Winter is coming and there will be rain, there will be gales and, especially on the hills, there will be thick, white snow.

So, get ready for it! Order in the groceries from Asda, with gratitude for the brave efforts of their delivery men, fill the freezer, turn up the heating if you dare. Batten down the hatches. It's time to do what we came for - time to write, time to paint, time to fill the house with the tantalising aroma of freshly baked bread and to relax by the fire with the latest knitting project. Knitting is 'in' this year; more and more young people are taking it up and experimenting with all the new designer yarns now on offer. That's good - I'd be doing it anyway, but it's a bonus to be in fashion.

Winter in Wales; a new experience for me: one step at a time, exploring this new season. Fifty-nine winters already under my belt, but never before in Wales. People make their own entertainment here. It's like living in a former era, when families and friends got together to make music, to eat and drink together on winter nights and to enjoy each other's company. Before the days of TV and computer technology, when families would gather round the glowing embers of the fire, with books, with sewing, around the piano, or with clarinet, flute or recorder, amusing themselves and each other till nightfall. There's a sense of creativity in the air here that seems to encourage such behaviour, that makes us sit contentedly with a favourite book, forgetting to turn on the telly. Everyone seems to have a hobby; arts and crafts of all kinds thrive in these tiny Welsh villages; choirs and amateur theatre groups abound; the art of making merry still lives on in the time-honoured fashion.

Is this a rose-tinted view? Is the reality a good deal harsher than this? Am I simply romanticising? Well, time will tell. There are two sides to every coin and I have yet to discover the flip side. No doubt the Asda delivery man will have tales to tell as he brings my groceries over the mountains through sleet and snow. For the moment, though, I will focus on the positive. It's the best way and I'm still in love with this newly discovered way of life, even though winter is on its way.