Rain

[andrewducker]

I'm just back in from a walk in the rain. For reasons beyond my understanding I decided that spending the entire day sitting in the cottage would be bad, and that I should go for a walk, despite the weather having started out badly and become worse. Not that it has turned into anything as majestic as a thunderstorm - I'm sure they happen here intermittently, but this evening was more like standing in a wind turbine with a shower attachment at one end - imagine high speed mist, hitting you in the face at thirty miles an hour.

I walked to the end of the drive and turned left, away from the wind. This was a great idea at the time, keeping the rain on my back as I walked up the hill, occasionally looking behind me to check for cars, but fifteen minutes later, as I crested the hill and looked out over the valley beneath me, I realised that I was going to have walk all the way back facing into the rain. In fact, I felt strangely exhilerated as I strode back, grinning in a somewhat manic fashion as the tiny drops beat off my forehead and glasses, reducing my vision to a prismed blur. By the time I got back I actually felt terribly, terribly happy, almost beyond the ability to talk as I hung up my coat by the heater and changed into dry trousers.

It was the kind of night when you expect to see something large and furry bound across the road, turning it's snout to look at you briefly before it heads on into the darkness. As it happens, I saw nothing more exciting than a van (although when I saw its headlights round the edge of the hill I originally assumed that I was seeing a lighthouse on the headland, and was terribly excited). Alas, maybe some other night.

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Very Iain Banks somehow (moving through the sf oeuvre I see,,)