Apparently at some point Tina Turner recorded a version of the song “I can’t stand the rain”… God knows where I must have been at the time, or maybe that is the version I remember and I just don’t realise it…
Anyway… this week, Autumn finally came to Ireland. Or maybe it was winter.
Monday was the greyest day in months, the sky felt like it was falling, or dropping, or dying. The sun finally gave up shining and we were left in the pits of gloom as only late autumn can bring.
Today was, naturally, worse. Maybe it was payback for me questioning the ultimate impact of global warming on our supposed ‘climate’… last week I wondered what else was going horribly wrong if it was 16 degrees celsius in Ireland in mid-October. Today I think I wished I had kept my mouth shut…
It rained. It rained and it rained and people got soaked and then they got miserably and then they took it out on each other.
I don’t know what it is about being drowned rats that turns people into such rude so-and-so-esque idiots. For a start there really should be rules, or at least laws, as regards umbrella etiquette. Not everyone is the same height, granted, but would it really take that much effort to avoid smashing umbrellas into each other?! Can you not just raise or lowers yours an inch, or better still move it to one side!!?
The best part about it of course is that in the absence of sunshine, or whatever the excuse is, the traffic gets worse, and the buses get later - or is that slower - or maybe both. So not only are we tired, and wet, and miserable, we are also late, and impatient, and frustrated. Road rage is nothing on rampant bus-stop rage.
The bus finally arrives but in itself this is little consolation. Faced with an extra half hour on a bus that is unpleasant at the best of times. Your seat is damp before you get to it, and someone larger and damper than you sits on you (or is that beside you?) as soon as you’re half-settled in your seat. Nobody will open a window so the air is even less pleasant and harder to breathe than usual. People talk louder, maybe trying to make up for their own misery, or maybe, just maybe, deliberately antagonising the new arrivals to the bus, the ones who waited in the rain longer and are that much less tolerant.
Warm showers. Never quite enough.
