The writer’s latest book is ‘In Love With Love: The Persistence & Joy Of Romantic Fiction’
To rain for 40 days has a biblical quality; also, an apocalyptic one. It has now been raining for 44 in the UK, continuously. I think I am not alone in feeling just mildly apocalyptic. By the time you read this, it may well be 45. Saturday might flash us a little cool sunshine, as a Valentine’s Day treat, but please don’t mistake this for hope: there is, according to the Met Office, “currently no sign of any prolonged dry weather for the next seven to 10 days”.
High pressure over Scandinavia is “trapping” the rain here, it seems, at the same time that blisteringly cold weather in North America pushes an icy jet stream across the Atlantic towards our wet, wet islands. When even official communications are describing the weather as “miserable” and “relentless”, you know it’s bad.
But it’s not like any of us need telling: the cat paces up and down by the back door, I pace up and down, like a couple of trapped tigers. Earlier this week, I saw a little piece of blue sky and ran to fetch my boots. By the time I had returned, boots on, it was raining again and the blue sky had been swamped by grey. And where we live has been relatively lucky: Aberdeen, for example, has not seen a single minute of sunshine in more than two weeks.
“Think of the reservoirs,” I say, grimly, day after day. “They said we needed a very wet winter to fill them up, and look!” I have said this now so many times that I am starting to believe it. “Think of the reservoirs, think of the canals, think of the rivers.”
As rivers burst their banks and canals collapse under the weight of water, this becomes somewhat less comforting. Water companies, especially those that prioritise shareholder dividends over tedious reservoir maintenance, will not guarantee that a winter this wet means a summer less dry. There is the unsettling and inescapable fact that the whole situation does not just feel apocalyptic, but in some ways is apocalyptic: a harbinger of the ways climate change is bringing the world we knew to an end, replacing it with something more extreme on both ends of the spectrum.
Hot, dry, drought-heavy summers; wet winters that seem, as the Met Office said, “stuck on repeat”. Sewers that spill into the sea. Farms flooded. Winter crops submerged for days; cattle and sheep brought indoors. The Wimbledon turf fields have “turned to jelly”; six months ago, they were “dry as biscuits”. (The turf farmers have a evocatively edible turn of phrase.) I watch the flood alerts with increasing panic. Our house sits halfway down a hill and in wet weather, the street outside can become a torrent, ankle-deep over the potholes.
How to survive 40 days of rain — and counting — could become a kind of template for how to survive in a world transformed: fight for change, or hide and hope it changes of its own accord; ignore it or embrace it. Hope for the best, and be ready for the worst. Take inspiration from Melissa Harrison’s Rain: Four Walks In English Weather, and open the door to what’s really there, even as you consider retreating to the cinema for the mizzle-ridden and thunder-storming Wuthering Heights. Lean in to the indoors when the indoors is what we have — braising things, slow-cooking things — and be outdoors when we can, in every minute break in the clouds.
Famously, there is no bad weather, only bad clothes: with the horizontal rain soaking directly through my inexpensive anorak, I’m starting to seriously doubt my wardrobe. A better coat. Sturdier boots. Vitamin D tablets. Turning on the SAD lamp. Demanding better from our water companies; demanding better from our government in tackling climate change. Considering a winter this wet every winter, and acting accordingly.
Otherwise, we risk ignoring the problem until it’s time to build an ark. And I, for one, am not a natural sailor.
There is a rare weather phenomenon called an ARkStorm which inundated the West Coast of North America in 1862 bringing almost two months of continuous rain and floods. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Flood_of_1862&wprov=rarw1