Rain In The Style Of Perry Cox

It’s raining again, great splashes of cold water on the windows of this silent car. It’s only silent inside if you ignore the rain I suppose but the sound is from the interface between the rain and the glass. Otherwise, the rest of the world is locked out and how safe it is in here. You know we all love the rain in this family. You will sometimes find us sat or standing in the porch with the door open just looking at the rain in the street. There isn’t that much to look at here but the rain makes it many more times interesting. The drops on the trees are like the bees on sunny days, movements in the limits of vision, drawing attention to their locations but gone when you move your eyes to them. Our old house was in the middle of common land under the forests of some well know spa hills and in these forests in a rain storm, you could stand dry and listen to the white noise of rain on the canopy. In winter, some rain might make it to ground but in the summer, the wind would fan the rain, making currents of damp air flow through the trees with a scent better than any tranquilizer.

When I first used to keep a diary (an adolescent embarrassment of clichéd observations and fantasies on many levels – no change there then) I would call the days of real downpours Grit-Splashers. I would cycle to college and stand elated in the rain, early enough to know I would be dry before I needed to talk to anyone. From this time, I would imagine myself in small places sheltered from but close to the rain that fell. Under The Ivy or in the broken down and blasted shed under the edge of the trees. Or in the door of the house. And thinking back, the closeness of the shelter was no comfort, just a component of the experience, a necessary component but one I did not need to survive.

Sometimes I think of all the places in the world where it rains at a particular moment, a clump of trees beside the M6, some deep bush in a forest in the Highlands, an overhanging alleyway in the city. They all exist like that tree in the quad maintained in their existence by their very solidity and atoms rather than by the omniscience of their creator. He may have set it all going but the rain that falls on these places is a creation of machinery, of clockwork and quantum. And then I am in that state again, thinking of everything and nothing, trying to imagine both states at the same time. They are both impossible things. Everything encompasses the limits of the universe and then some, all the possible creation sciences that explain the big-bang and all the possible other Universes beyond it. Everything has all that is possible to imagine as existing or happening, all possible space and all possible time, the brain state of EVERYTHING. And nothing has nothing and cannot take up space even in its description here. This sentence is infinitely too big for nothing as nothing needs no space and no time. Switch between the two and you will switch between two unknowables going via so many more and so much that is mundane and real, the ice in a comet or the light from a flickering TV. When I was a kid, this would fry me, sit me in the corner with no thought other than this flip-flop of reality that blinded me to the rubbish of what really kept me going, to food and water and books and being out of the cold.

With the rain, it is grey and windy, stereotypical British summer, with the trees lashing about and the umbrellas making way, white noise outside but so quiet in here. On one rainy day, my class watched as our teacher went to raid the school bee-hive, I am sure expecting that the cold and wet would keep the insects quiet and happy at this theft. We sniggered at the stings he got but he came back with wax and golden, gooey honey, enough for us all to take a swig for it ran like wine down our throats as the rain made the wooden hut rattle. We could feel it shaking but it was the end of summer term and we had no work other than to draw the honeycomb before it all got eaten. That hut was full of natural things, wasps’ nests, flaky and papery on the cupboards at the back, skulls of various road-killed animals boiled clean by the teacher in spare lessons, and ranged in size from the badger to the shrew, a tiny, delicate thing that fell apart just being breathed on. Outside this room, one day, another teacher tried the oil-can collapsed by the weight of the atmosphere, not with a 2 litre castrol can but a pre-steel band drum, maybe one of the barrels, the price of which we are so concerned about. He placed it over a fire of some kind, boiling the dirty water inside it until the jet of hot air escaping from it made the big school behind it shimmer like a mirage. Then he sealed it. Eventually we heard a great crack as the contracting air inside was overcome by the miles of weighty gas over our heads. Air crushing us like paper rolled up and made art. But this was science. And the drum cracked again when we threw cold water at it so we could pick it up and return it to the caretaker.

I return from my diversion there. It still rains here but not as heavily as before. But it still rains and that makes me happier than anything. A void for most people, this is my paradise, a place where the spaces that fill with pain and anxiety are instead taken up with water. Like self-harm, it is something to take your mind off things, something that has a defined end and you know will go away. But who wants it to go away?