Even fervent rain-lovers such as Donald Clarkeare being forced to revise their belief systems by the incessant deluge we know as summer 2008
IT'S PROBABLY SUNNY today, but when I began writing this column it was bleeding raining again. I know what you're thinking: if you wanted to hear some middle-aged malcontent complaining about the weather, you would go and stand in the closest bus queue or hail the nearest cab. Global bloody warming. That's a laugh! So the ill-informed amateur meteorologist might whine. If I had that Al Gore in the back of my cab, I'd give him a piece of my mind.
Are you still there? Well, listen to this. The rain has finally broken my spirit. Like Vercingetorix at Alesia (or Buzz Lightyear when confronted with evidence of his own ordinariness), I have had to reluctantly face up to certain unwelcome realities. The sun-worshippers have got me on the run.
Since the end of the last Ice Age and the arrival of more variable weather patterns, an evil conspiracy of climatic fascists has worked hard at evangelising for the indisputable desirability of hot weather. I use words like evil and fascist because I enjoy annoying reasonable readers and because the sun-worshippers genuinely do exhibit a quite fanatical dedication to their religion.
It is, to these folk, an orthodoxy that sunny weather is preferable to relaxingly temperate cloudy conditions. Just consider the way certain meteorological terms have taken on negative metaphorical connotations. If I describe my friend as being gloomy, you imagine a sour-faced misanthrope. Were I, on the other hand, to say my chum is sunny, then a vision of a cheery joker would pop into your brain.
Argue for the pleasures that a grey day brings - the comfort of pullovers, freedom from sweat and a marked decrease in buskers - and you will, like as not, be met with the first two of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous five stages of grief: denial and anger.
The first response is understandable. When The Jesus and Mary Chain sang Happy When it Rains, most sensible listeners did not think of some wise old bird appreciating the delicious smells of damp leaves and mouldering soil; they imagined a pathetic Goth making an unconvincing attempt to appear half in love with easeful death. If you explain to the sun-lover that, whereas the pasty-faced teenage misery-guts seeks reassuring melancholy from cloud and damp, such weather actually lightens your mood and inclines you towards afternoon frolics and the music of Herman's Hermits, he or she will sink ever further into fervent denial. No sane fellow could think such a thing. Keep it up and the anger will show itself. It is almost as if they fear that, by speaking approvingly of rain, you will persuade some climatic deity to deliver the desired deluge.
Think of the beautiful cathartic rain shower towards the end of Andrei Tarkovsky's classic Russian film Stalker. Too high-brow? Consider damp Kirsten Dunst kissing upside-down Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man, or - you're way ahead of me - Gene Kelly dancing through the puddles and the rivulets in Singin' in the Rain. The great film-makers know that, unlike the uncomfortable, nagging nothingness of sunlight, rain counts as An Event.
It makes the characters (literally) shine and opens up an endless series of symbolic possibilities.
Yet sun-worshippers will insist - really, really insist - that all human beings, however hard they may deny it, are rendered merry by sunlight and miserable by gloom. Argue otherwise and you are guilty of wilful perversity.
The time has come to put a stop to this unreason. Throw open the windows. Fall out into the damp. Allow your hair to get soaked in the . . . Oh, will you stop bloody raining! It's no good. There comes a point when even the most fervent raindancer has to admit defeat and acknowledge the sheer, grinding monotony of this summer's weather.
Far from being - to return to our discussion of Stalker and Spider-Man - An Event, the current three-month monsoon has taken on the character of everyday routine, of ambient noise, of the awareness of mortality. It's just there all the time.
The unstoppable torrent is not quite as boring as sunlight, you understand, but another month of this stuff and I may have to write an angry letter to God. Or Michael Fish.
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