Rain

Normally I like rain, especially when I’m inside and other people are not. I watch them getting soaked, and smile. At times in my youth I relished getting caught in the rain myself. Walking home from school through a torrential downpour without an umbrella (no child thinks to take an umbrella to school), I would sometimes pass deliberately under an open drainpipe as I went down Welshmill Road, in the knowledge that I couldn’t be any more soaked to the skin than I already was.

Last Friday afternoon, compelled to walk to the railway station through heavy vertical rain with nothing but my pathetic Sainsbury’s umbrella for shelter, I cursed the weather. It had entirely lost its appeal. I was compelled to take refuge briefly in a convenient shop on Trumpington Street, where I loitered in the blithely optimistic hopes that somehow my shirt sleeves would become marginally less saturated and that the rain would die down. After several minutes of procrastination I purchased two packs of Mentos. On exiting the shop it became apparent that the ferocity of the rain had not lessened with time. My vocal pleas for it to kindly fuck off were not heeded, and I plodded on depressed.

At some point on Hills Road, I had a revelation. No, not a revelation, but rather a reminder that when I was five, in Miss Loveridge’s class at St John’s, whenever going-home time was approaching and there was rain outside, we would sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ together. Every time, without fail, the grey clouds dispersed, the sun poked out his impudent marmalade fingers (Vivian Stanshall), and by 3.30 you wouldn’t have known it had been wet at all, save for the trace of a rainbow in the firmament.

Trudging past Domino’s on one side of the road and Richer Sounds on the other, regretting that my journey was nearly over and that I hadn’t thought of employing this strategy earlier, but glad at least of the prospect of five minutes of walking in the warmth and dryness, I attempted a belated hum. Nothing.

Here is a Hungarian cartoon about a man with Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Brine

I have a new website, World of Brine.

It started as a joke, to be honest, the genesis of which may be too tedious to relate. But it’s turning out to be a revelation.

My criterion for inclusion is simple: the involvement of brine. For this blog, I generally wait for something to take my interest, and then write about it. For World of Brine, I need to actively seek out things to post. After all, what does anyone know about brine? (Nobody knows anything about brine.) My knowledge of the subject is certainly lacking (though not, I trust, for long). So I trawl the internet (unintentional fishing metaphor) for videos, literary quotations, pictures, websites, that make reference to brine (or people or things called Brine).

And how rewarding it has been. Brine crops up in the greatest of literary works (Shakespeare, Byron, predictably Melville), there are many videos on YouTube of brine preservation techniques, brine shrimp and the like, and I have found this likable portrait of Augustus Brine (1769-1840), who enlisted in the British Navy as a Midshipman at the age of thirteen aboard HMS Belliqueux under the command of his father. The painting, by John Singleton Copley, dates from 1782 and hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I don’t know if World of Brine will take off, but so far it’s been a pleasing experiment.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Muguet

On this day twelve years ago, I was in the middle of two weeks in the South-West of France doing work experience at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bayonne. I think that although the librarians sensed I might be a useful guy to have around, they didn’t have a great deal of work for me to do. I certainly stamped some new acquisitions with the legend ‘Veuillez ne pas tenter de réparer les ouvrages vous-même’, wiped down returned children’s books with disinfectant, took part in (or at least was present at) a children’s story session, and went to a bookshop with my patronne Magali (still happily there, I see) to select new stock.

The record library upstairs was presided over by an effete dandy who looked like Ravel. Unless I misunderstood, I believe I was told that a system was in place whereby CDs were magnetised in such a way that the data stored on them would be wiped if they were taken past the sensors at the entrance without being borrowed. Can this have been true? I can at least state for a fact that it was in the music library that I discovered William Sheller, whose album Les Machines Absurdes I went out and bought directly from the department store Extrapole. There was music playing constantly upstairs, and one afternoon the staff kindly allowed me to select some of their CDs to put on. I remember choosing some Fats Waller (including this), which raised a few eyebrows. Maybe they were used to more sedate music. I don’t know if it affected business.

During the week I stayed with a charming (I am tempted to say perfect) and irritatingly photogenic family of six (three girls, one boy) in Anglet, the mother giving me a lift to and collecting me from work each day, and in the weekend in the middle I stayed with my exchange student Mathieu (who couldn’t accommodate me during the week, being a boarder at a Lycée de Chauffage Central or some such establishment) in Narrosse, just outside Dax.

At some point during the weekend, Mathieu’s mother presented me with a flower, explaining that it was the tradition in France to give each other muguet on 1st May. I struggle with names of flowers in English, let alone French, but I did happen to know that muguet was Lily of the Valley, I think because I had seen it written down on a bilingual bottle of liquid soap.

On checking my dictionary, I found the word had another definition, and Mathieu’s mother’s words took on a more sinister tone. I was grateful to get back to the library on Monday morning and start disinfecting.

Why not take a leaf out of the French’s book, and give muguet to someone you love today?

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

A fantasy

It snowed yesterday morning, a miniature blizzard in Cambridge, a fight against the elements in the biting cold. Head down, I arrived at work besnowflaked and damp.

Later in the morning, the snow turned into rain. I looked out of a window across the Backs, the snow melting on the lawn, and saw the University Library in the distance. I suddenly had the sensation that I was Leo in The Go-Between, in an unfamiliar house, the grey-brown sky outside, the puddles.

Perhaps if I try hard enough, I will become Leo, I thought. Sometimes when I really want something that my rational mind knows to be impossible (normally invisibility), I can make myself believe, momentarily, that it may happen.

I had to stop being Leo and go back to work, but for a few seconds it was nice to be somewhere else.