Rainy Thoughts.

As I write this it’s currently 5:53 am on Thursday the 18th of June.

As far as I’m aware, we have been in quarantine for roughly 12 decades and yet somehow, everything is still quite fucked.

Despite the fact that it’s June, i’m sitting happily with the living room door open – and the morning rain is signing in time with the birds just outside.

There’s something, I think, quite appealing about the early morning rain in England. It’s constant downpour could come off as quite aggressive, if it wasn’t so damn indecisive about whether it should be a storm or not – but that’s Britain for you, I suppose. In the end the whole thing just feels a bit dreary and boring. There is a nice smell though.

There’s a crooked fence in my garden.

It hasn’t always been that way.

In fact, I actually think the crookedness of the whole scenario is a relatively new development.

Ironically, there’s also a rather large number of wooden planks laid out on the patio that were meant to be used to make said crooked fence. But they’re being left to dry so I imagine they’ll be done by sometime around April 2021.

I must admit, the sun loungers do seem a bit excessive once you see them being rained on. Maybe getting two out in the middle of June was a bit presumptuous. But then, who am I to judge? I’m wearing trackies for the hundredth day in a row, and I’ve exercised maybe three times since lockdown started.

What does rain smell like? It’s got such a warm, enticing smell – but lord knows I can’t place it.

There’s something almost nostalgic about English rain. Maybe I’ve seen one too many Hugh Grant movies, but there’s something about it that just seems so comforting to me.

Every so often there’s a crackle or rumble sound, and it always takes me a moment to decide whether it’s thunder, a train or the pipes. After a while they just all sort of blur into one I suppose.

Do I mean nostalgic, when I think of the rain, or do I mean sad? I suppose there’s always been the association. Everyone wants their day to be sunshine and rainbows, no-one wants grey clouds and a slight drizzle.

I don’t even know what I want to be sad about. But the rain makes me feel like I should be sad about something. Like I should rest my head against the door frame and sing something that wouldn’t go amiss on an Ed Sheeran album. I’m sure he’s made a song about rain. Someone will have made him by now.

I wonder what it will be like after the lockdown. I’m worried I might have actually forgotten how to talk to real human beings that aren’t the peopleI work with at Tesco. What if I’ve become boring? What if everyone’s become boring? What if everyone meets up at a house party in September and we’ve literally all spent the last six months of our lives inside our homes with our immediate family, as the Government has suggested. How shit would that be?

What if no one’s had some significant weight loss? What if no one’s broken up with their girlfriend but gotten back together because they spent a little time apart and realised they actually really are ready to commit?

What if no one’s got a funny story about that one time their Gran came round to visit and she was so excited to see the grandkids that she waved her arms around just a bit too much and knocked a bright red candle over, leaving a irremovable stain all over their Mum’s brand new beige carpet? What if no one got so drunk on a Zoom pub quiz that they spent the next day with a hangover, despite having neither been to the pub or won the quiz?

What if no one stayed up the whole night because they couldn’t stop thinking about things that don’t even really matter, until they find themselves sitting on the floor by the living room door with a laptop writing a stupid Google document at nearly 7 am by this point for no real reason other than to get thoughts onto paper?

Christ, that would be boring. But to be fair, all those ideas are completely insane and probably won’t happen anyway.

So.

06:47 am.

It’s still raining by the way. I don’t know if that came across.

This has actually been quite therapeutic in a way. I’m not exactly sure what way that is, but that’s by the by.

I saw a Tik Tok the other day that said you could make $$$$$ being a freelance writer on Fiverr. But who would actually pay money for any of this rubbish? I suppose the best thing, for me, about being a writer is how it’s never seemed like a job. It’s always just been a hobby, like baking. Just something I can do on my own to zone out and get into a semi-coherent headspace. It’s like a grounding technique really – or that’s the closest thing I can equate it to, from my history with mental health professionals.

Having to sit down and establish a sentence, the grammar, the spelling, etc.

It brings me down to Earth just a bit, and makes me actually think about the things that are in front of me.

There’s another noise. This time it was a train.

This has actually been rather nice. Not so nice that I’ll start waking up this early every day. Good lord no. But nice. Simple.

I wonder what time my Mum wakes up in the mornings. Obviously I know she always does, because she’s always awake before me, but I’ve never actually asked how early it is that she gets up.

Well, it’s 7:01 am now and I haven’t heard any alarms go off so maybe I’ll be here for another hour. Unless my Mum is one of those weird people that just wakes up at 7 for whatever reason. It’s their “body clock” or something. Maybe it’s just something to do with being middle-aged.

Although, obviously my Mum is only 25 years old.

Which is easy to believe until you find out she has a 22 year old son.

I like to see faces in things that don’t have faces. That sounds weird, but just outside there’s a collection of pebbles on the patio that look exactly like a nose and two dot eyes; and just next to it, there’s slight dents in the patio slabs that resemble a nose, mouth and chin. So I can’t just be seeing things – because it really is uncanny.

This rain really is just unrelenting. It’s not harsh, but it just doesn’t stop. It’s weird really when you think about it. There’s just water falling out of the sky, because it couldn’t bear to be in the sky any longer.

Note to self: look up if that’s the correct spelling for ‘bear’, because that word will haunt me forever.

Frankly, they should have one spelling for the animal and one spelling for everything else, to avoid confusion.

I think another reason I like writing so much is that it can be very self-indulgent, which I think I’ve very much made the case for here.

In all fairness, just going off the view, you wouldn’t know it was 7:20 am. It could just as well be 11:47 am, or 4:21 pm. Yeah. 4:21 pm. What a time. You can do anything then. The world is your proverbial oyster at 4:21 pm. Especially on a Thursday like this. You could watch a movie, or eat some marshmallows, or smoke a joint. Hey, i’m not your boss. Do what you like. It’s your 4:21 pm.

What I mean to say is, because of the clouds and rain you can’t see the Sun, so you wouldn’t have half a clue as to what time it was without a clock. Luckily, every electronic device in the world now has a clock hidden inside it in some fashion.

So no, it’s not 4:21 pm. It’s not even 7:21 am, anymore. It’s actually now somewhere closer to 7:26 am, but hey. That’s life.

I’m not entirely sure how I should end this. Whatever it is. It’s not an article. A blog maybe? I suppose I’ll put it on my blog at some stage. In an ideal word I’d go away and transcribe this and turn it into a podcast. Maybe put some nice rain noises in the background, turn it into an ASMR type of thing that people could listen to to help them sleep. That would be ironic.

I’d say I don’t have the time, but that’s not true. I’ve got more than enough time. Time is going around in buckets at the moment. Everyone’s got time.

Fuck, I’m tired.

I suppose I’ve been awake for about twenty-one hours, at standard currency rates. It’s definitely not the longest I’ve ever been awake for, but it does start to drag after a while.

On the brightside, I might actually have breakfast for once. I’m normally too late for it, and just settle with lunch. I wonder what we have in. A nice fry up would hit the spot for me I reckon. Couple sausages, toast, beans, the whole shi-bang. Lovely job.

If rain was a person, she’d have rather light blue eyes. And pale skin. And she’d be shy at first, but very bubbly as soon as you got to know her. She’d have dark brown hair that would always seem a bit messy, even when she did it up. She’d have a small collection of plants on her windowsill, but she’d never be able to keep any of them alive. She tried to keep them alive, of course, something always just seemed to go a bit wrong with them.

Ooh. Noise upstairs. Someone’s awake.

08:01 am.

Right on schedule.

Guess I should call this a night then. Or morning. Whatever.

Bye x

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