Still falls the rain ...*

I feel a bit of a cheat using the title of a poem I really hardly know for this post -it's by Edith Sitwell, and it's very typical, I think, of a period I find rather strange and I first came across it when a dear friend suggested my #1 son refer to it in the dissertation he was writing for SYS English over 30 years ago. However, the relentlessness of today's rain, beginning fairly low-key at breakfast time but turning up the quantity as the day wore on really began to get to me ...

We were up early today in case The Gas Man turned up, but all we had at breakfast time was a phone call to say he was at an emergency job and would be immediately after his lunch break. I didn't go shopping before breakfast, however, because it wasn't a full shop but one which in the event took just about as long as if it had been. I wasn't helped by having mislaid my back door key - one of these real senile moments when I could remember picking it up this morning from where I had prominently left it yesterday but for the life of me couldn't think what I'd done with it after that... (It turned up in a pocket, where I'd put it while I picked up other things.)

Safely back for coffee, I did my Italian and took the end of my lunch through to the room where the gas man would not be. I sat reading the paper with Wimbledon on in the background and listened to his arrival, along with a Gas Boy (his apprentice) who crashed in and out of the front door fetching things from the van. Much drama ensued, however, when a bleeper suddenly screeched from GM's pocket and he vanished in the van, leaving GB stranded - not once, but twice. GM is a firefighter, and there was an emergency ...

In the midst of this an escape route offered in the shape of Di, who was at the vet's nearby with one of the family dogs, phoning to see if I fancied a walk in the rain. (Baby, I've been here before ...) Five minutes later she was outside my gate and I was heading out in my still-damp trainers to join her in a trek round the Bishop's Glen lower reservoir. We must have looked strange, as she was wearing shorts and I had put on my climbing breeches because I was sick of wet trousers flapping round my calves - but the glen was empty of any human life form and we squelched round unremarked. My photos come from that, showing her mad little dog waiting in a burn for her to throw something and then leaping for it, as well as a major torrent further on and the new stream that had started up and was flooding the forest floor below the track. You'll have to imagine the sound of the roaring water ...

And that was that. The gas fire is overhauled, the alarms tested, and I had a walk. Himself produced his usual delicious curry and we watched the tennis - quite a tension-producing match, in the end. Now the rain has more or less stopped, but our silver tree is thrashing about again and I'm for my bed.

I do hope we have some respite soon.

* https://youtu.be/6hpgXNp3iiE?si=HKGxD46SqlPfln6J