Rain in Rome

It’s raining

– Are you okay? – asks Michael.
– Of course, only now, that the rain is over, I’m hot in the waterproof gloves, so I change them back for the normal ones. – I reply.
– You should never say it in Britain!
– Oh my goodness, what? (What again? I still struggle with the language, and I sometimes say funny stupidities.)
– That the rain is over. Because then it immediately resumes.

In Britain it has been raining for four months. The advertisements posted in March, which encouraged to saving water in the critical shortage situation after the two past years of drought, were first faded out and then slowly washed away by the rain.

In the morning (in a way very much un-British which cannot be condemned enough) I watch from the upstairs window as the lady next door in wellington boots and with umbrella wades through the ankle-deep puddles to reach the official garden pool and feed her gold fishes.


Since early April the BBC weather forecast website has hardly used the sunny and sunny interval icons more than a dozen times. The remaining days have been described with a subtle variation of the following terms:

Drizzle
Fog
Mist
Light rain
Heavy rain
Light rain shower
Heavy rain shower
Grey cloud
White cloud

However, bad weather in Britain shows such an amazing variation that all the above is precious little to describe it enough. The local weathermakers are even more unsuccessful than their colleagues in Budapest. To mitigate the situation, the above website increased from three-hourly to hourly their forecast graphs, but by this move they only increased their percentage of fault.


In fact, you should not expect more than this. To predict, or even to describe the weather of this country you need different skills than what a simple engineer may owe.

Something like this:

“It was raining for four years, eleven months and two days. Sometimes only drizzling, then everyone dressed up, with a face like convalescents, and was going to celebrate the clearing up, but they soon learned that such breaks are followed by even more gloom. The sky poured down rumbling its load (…) Seeing that the Second Aureliano is engaged in mounting the door-handles and taking the clocks apart, Fernanda thought that maybe he was chased by the same passion of creation-destruction as Colonel Aureliano Buendía with the gold fishes. (…) But that was not true. Only the rain was to be accused, which turned everything upside down, so that even the gears of the most sterile machines put out shoots of flowers if they were not oiled every three days. The metal threads of the brocades got rusty, and saffron-colored algae were born on the wet underwear. The air was so wet that the fishes could swim in through the door and then out through the window. (…) To drain off the water accumulated in the house, they had to dig channels, sweep off the toads and snails so the floor could dry up, they could take the bricks off from under the feet of the beds, and they could wear shoes again.”

(G. G. Márquez: Hundred Years of Solitude)

Of course not exactly like this. In Britain, for example, it is much colder than in Columbia.

– In Hungary the most powerful rainmaker spell is sheet spreading. – I say to Michael.
– Here, we go and play cricket. – he says.

But now there is absolutely no need of anything like this.