The thing about an English summer is...

It’s July in England and the rain is coming down with vulgar enthusiasm. For the last couple of weeks it has been Wimbledon fortnight. In recent years this fortnight has extended into three weeks as days of matches were rained off and rescheduled. This time, it just felt like three weeks. I have concluded that it does not matter how tight the top or how short the skirt, tennis is just not a spectator sport. This is partly because the lesbians playing women’s tennis are not, as on the internet, gorgeous and only exercising as a precursor to showering together, but mainly because it’s so dull.

Dull, but not restful. All that grunting, all that thwacking, all that self-conscious banana eating. With a small tweak though, coverage of Wimbledon could remove these unwanted intrusions and become positively medicinal.

There’s a DAB digital radio station you can tune to called ‘Birdsong’. It is, as the name would suggest, not the sound of disturbed giggling but rather the fruits of sticking a microphone in a hedgerow at dawn. The only sounds are the restless twitter of our feather friends and the occasional grumbling of an ill-humoured baker driving to work. This plays on an endless loop and is designed to be a test signal. It also squats on digital radio stations when they go off air. This recently happened to a station and they saw their audience share double when they turned off Jay-zed and turned on starlings.

What digital telly needs is the visual equivalent – the sight of the rain falling on Wimbledon, the gentle hiss, like static from the telly, of rain falling on the covers, ball boys and stubborn tennis-fans who retain their seats in the pouring rain, camped out under one of those transparent ponchos with ‘maid of the mist’ written on it, consuming scotch eggs in a revolting fashion.

There is something relaxing about watching the rain, especially when it is on the outside of a pane of glass, especially if that glass is etched with the name of a pub.

Certainly, I experienced the rain in a far more al fresco and immediate fashion this morning on my walk to the station, which became an undignified sprint to the station and ended up gasping squelch to the station. Odd really that the inferno of anger, frustration and rage directed at the rain, the weather-gods and anyone who happened to be dry did not turn the rain to steam as it approached a ten metre radius of my quivering body.

Sitting damp on the train, I decided that it was time to break yet another personal rule. It was time to buy an umbrella. I don’t like umbrellas, if you attempt to walk past somebody using one, you risk eye-poke or, as the angle turns, having a half-pint of fresh rainwater decanted onto you. If you try to use one then you discover that rain rarely happens without a great deal of wind to go with it, and unless you are lucky enough to have an umbrella that turns itself inside out at a zepher’s breath, you are left fighting something that is capturing the wind with all the energy of a rebelling spinnaker on the Cape leg of the America’s Cup.

Still, I have never had the slightest problem sacrificing my morals for the sake of personal comfort. So, on the way home I bolted into M&S and did a circuit of the men’s section like a wall of death rider on ketamin. No brolly, but a mac! Fantastic, it was of just the right material (shockingly unnatural and hence waterproof), cut (early 1970s dirty-old-man) and colour (ealy 1970s drab) to make it irresistible.

Then I saw the brolly, which came with that perfect handle, the sort that is hooked like the end of a question mark, making it ideal for hooking round the neck of the chap in front of you who is going to beat you to your seat on the train.

The brolly is perfect John Steed. The mac is exactly tailored to make me look like a bent copper from one of the seedier police forces. Perfect.

Tropical Downpour? Call Al Gore!

Surrey has been experiencing what Government scaremongers are pleased to call ‘an extreme weather event’, the rest of us call rain and I call ‘a f**king downpour’. You know that scene when Gene Kelley stands under that downspout during the wonderful ‘singing in the rain’ sequence from the eponymous film (gay test: worried your son likes musicals more than hunting? Show him ‘singing in the rain’ and ask him his opinion. If he rates it as anything less than ‘fantastic’, shoot him – better a poof than somebody with no taste, as my Uncle Janice used to say), it was just like that. Gutters overflowed and you could see the rain sheeting off the roof tiles.

We got about a weeks’ rain in ten minutes. The reaction to this is a useful measure of where you are on the civilization scale. If your thoughts run along the lines of ‘This will do the grazing in the lower paddock no end of good’, then essentially, you don’t have to worry. If you think ‘shit, that sounds like a mud slide – I wonder if my hut wall will hold it back?’ – then you should really look to moving to high ground and a first world country with an economy that’s not based on anything you put in a mug and stir.

Most of us probably fall somewhere in between (I was worried about my recently planted tomato plants on my allotment), but all of us are, I hope, agreed on one thing, getting caught in the rain leading to jumping about and grinning only happens in Hollywood films written, and acted, by people so stoned off their tits that the most common form of dampness they experience is when they pee themselves when high and don’t notice until they come to on the floor of their home if they are lucky or the cell they now share with ‘Bubba’ if they are not.

So while I can admire the power of nature, I’m of an age now where the sensation of wet clothing sticking to my body is like that moment when you brush up against a wet shower curtain and it sticks to you – but all over. That scene in the shower in Psycho – those screams were real, Hitch pushed a wet clammy shower curtain up against Janet Leigh again and again and again. The only good time for the heavens to open is when somebody suggests returning to the office after this lunchtime pint, or when the commentator says ‘England surely hoping that something happens here that will force the draw.’

I can’t stand the rain…

Okay, it’s time to break out the snorkel and check the new-born for webbed fingers. I know it’s Wimbledon-time but this is taking the piss. It’s raining!

No, I mean it’s like St Swithen and Noah looking out and saying ‘better take an umbrella’. It’s wet. But the wet is coming in ten minute packages. And it’s a week’s wet! It’s so wet I was draining my rain-barrel into the drain. It’s so wet I was battling ants who were driven by the water into my house (so far the winner appears to be me and my mastic gun sealing every micro-crack at the back of the house, but they are sneaky bastards).

It’s so wet that I almost, almost, regret putting lawn feed on my lawn a couple of weeks ago, when it started raining. One word: meadow.

Bald patches, moss, clover, bare patches, those patches where I hammered the gazebo into last summer…all gone. Fertiliser and a LOT of water = knee high grass.