Rain weirds the world

Get off me you lug

Like a pilot whale

Today I will write about rain. This is mostly because I love rain, and I do not understand people who only see it as a negative thing. This morning, it was raining cats and dogs (UK), raining pocketknives (Brazilian), raining old women with clubs (Afrikaans), raining like a pissing cow (French), raining pilot whales (Faroese). I got to my studio early for a 7.15am spin class, put a raincoat over my cycling shorts and set off to the gym next door, which is in this extraordinary building:

I have to look at this building — Quarry House — every day as it is 400 metres from East Street Arts. I find it both hideous and impressively unashamed of its ugliness. But sometimes when I look up at it and marvel at the architect who thought this was a good idea, and all the other people along the process who agreed with him/her, I remember my friend Randolph telling me a story. The building houses the Department for Work and Pensions and various NHS departments, and Randolph had a contract for the NHS. Randolph is a fell running friend who is noteworthy for always being late to races, always running in glasses, being a smoker, and never running in autumn or winter. Anyway Randolph told me that a falcon nested on the eaves of this ugly building, that he could hear the falcon — or the falcon and family — when he worked in the presumably bland office spaces within. So this morning, in the old woman with clubs rain, I stood and looked up at the roof and hoped, as I hope every time I head for the gym, to see a falcon doing its early morning fly-by.

Instead there was just rain, and I loved it. But when I left after the spin class, someone who had been cycling next to me was also leaving, and stood at the exit door and said, “nightmare,” and once again I thought, why do so many people hate rain? It is growth and life and freshness. It is the smell that rises from the ground, and the sound of my drips in my chimney. It is sloshing through boggy ground on the moors, and knowing that my allotment will be more of a jungle than it was last week.

Here is John Walker, a walker, writing in Outside magazine about the beauty of being outside in the rain:

In short: rain weirds the dry world. The light diffuses, almost inverts; shadows vanish. Certain animals become scarce, while others slither forth. Plants—polished to a high gloss and juiced with cloud-born nitrogen—begin to glow. A sweet, dirty perfume (called petrichor) rises up, aerosolized, from the earth. Sounds are amplified: the lone trill of a warbler can sometimes be heard from many miles away. And yet sounds also become warped, so that same trill might be unrecognizable to all but the shrewdest birder. Even your skin feels different: slick, nacreous, and, so long as you are moving, surprisingly not-cold. At the end of the day, when you strip off your clothes and change into something dry, even a modest campfire becomes a form of opiate. Afterward, you sleep like a junkie, long and dreamless. Rising the next morning to another day of rain, you again dread the idea of walking in it. Then, once you start walking, invariably, you’re glad that you did.

Melissa Harrison wrote a whole book on rain, which I have not read but now will. I will read it because it is about rain, but also for the glossary of terms for rain which she includes. I like “mizzle,” although I’m not sure it’s a word (that fine mist that wets you but is not quite drizzle). Harrison has:

• Dibble : to rain slowly in drops (Shropshire)

• Fox’s wedding : sudden drops of rain from a clear sky (south-west)

• Letty : enough rain to make outdoor work difficult (Somerset)

Then there are drookit, dreich, blunks and plothering.

There is picking, from Welsh, and stoating rain in Scotland. There are cloudbursts and stair rods.

This variety and beauty does not penetrate the Met Office’s scale for different degrees of rain. For metereologists, there are only light, moderate and severe downfalls. How much more descriptive is the Beaufort Scale, for wind: light air and a calm sea; a near gale and a rough sea. There are versions of the scale with terse descriptions and those that go further:

I know people who live in flood risk areas must feel differently about rain. Tomorrow there is a yellow alert, meaning a slight risk to life and business, and we are due to get two months’ worth of rain in a day. I dread aquaplaning. I know that sewers will be overloaded by storm water, and that sewage discharges, already criminally high, will be gigantic tomorrow.

Martin Parr, Bad Weather, Halifax 1978

But still, I love rain.

Here is Rain by Raymond Carver. It’s allegedly a poem, in the way that poems that are actually chunks of prose with unusual line breaks are judged to be poems. I’m including it for one line that I like.

In the keep of this rainy morning.

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My mind is blown corner

• Three stowaways survived a 3,500 mile journey in a small space above a ship’s rudder and thought they were heading to Europe, not Brazil.

• Leprosy is still going strong.

• I saw a family on a bike the other week: Dad, a toddler in a bike seat behind him, and another child sitting on the cross-bar. Only the toddler had a helmet. It was so stupid. Unless your head is made of steel, just wear a helmet. Especially the middle-aged on e-bikes. The Dutch say so.

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Animal hero of the week : Cow 569

Before I begin my praise-song for this week’s animal, a hat-tip to Ireland’s Farmer’s Journal for this curious 404 message:

I wanted to write about Millie the orangutan this week. I wrote about her for the Independent on Sunday, and travelled to Florida to meet her. She had cerebral palsy and was getting therapy and it was a wonderful story and also the only occasion I’ve been pinned down by a 1 year-old orangutan and realised how terrifyingly strong they are.

But I can’t find the text I wrote so Millie will wait (RIP: she died in 2004).

Instead, Cow 569. In 2004, on the New Zealand farm where Cow 569 lived, it was raining. The river rose overnight, and in the morning, farmer Kim Riley was alarmed to see how high the flood had come. She and her husband attempted to move cattle up to higher ground, but they hadn’t noticed that the floodwaters had flooded the cattle barn, and their cattle were floating. Soon Kim was floating too, amongst the cows. For half an hour, Kim fought to stay afloat, then she saw Cow 569 floating past and grabbed her.

"She didn't set out to be a hero, but she definitely did save me. She didn't say 'ooh there's the boss I better go and get her'. She's a bit of a stroppy old tart, she would've probably thought 'get off me you lug'."

Cows are good swimmers. They blow their stomach up to float better, Kim said. And they can paddle.

No idea if this is the right cow

I wrote about swimming cows in Ninety Percent because I told the story of the sinking of the livestock carrier Danny FII. It was carrying 10,224 sheep, 17,932 cows and 83 men, until it wasn’t.

There was cattle in the water—pounding waves, darkness, people screaming, howling and thrashing beasts everywhere: it sounds like a section of hell that Dante forgot to include. Nicolás saw a Pakistani crew-mate holding onto the tail of a heifer as a flotation device. Ahmad Harb saw this too. He found it as astonishing as the fact that calves can swim. “A person should know that what is des- tined to happen will happen,” he said. “If a person is to live, he will live, and the reason could be a calf.” Harb lived, reaching shore at Akkar with his cow-shaped lifebelt.

Cow 569 died in 2014 and was celebrated by Stuff magazine’s very Yorkshire headline “Cow 569 is dead.” She had produced 12 calves, a ****ton of milk, and was 17 years old. And she was never given a name.