Tea & biltong with the Queen: Droewors, Ma’am? Or maybe sliced kudu?
If you’re lucky there is no need for an alarm and you drift slowly and naturally into consciousness. You half open your eyes and peer over the edge of your duvet – the room is dark, lighter than pre-dawn, but darker than the usual curtain-filtered outlook. There is a quality of gloom to the light, and the pattering that woke you so gently makes itself known. It’s raining. And it sounds like it’s really set in. You snuggle back down into the sleep-warmed covers and curl up for a lie in. Responsibilities be damned: you’re having a rainy day in.
Well, that was the old Saturday or Sunday mornings, the pre-UK weekend mornings – when “rainy” was not the norm and thus could be enjoyed. The stereotype a South African would have you believe is that if you waited for a dry day in Britain, you would never get anything done. That’s not really fair – and even if it was, the real problem is not the wet but the familiarity of it. When it is not the exception, you can’t excuse not getting it all done.
The wet conditions are so common that the weathermen have had to invent new euphemisms for crap weather, e.g.: “all in all, it’s going to be a very unsettled day” – which means “it’s going to rain all day but because it may stop for a minute or two, we won’t use the word ‘constant’ ”.
To make matters worse, you don’t just nip into your car under the cover of your garage, drive to work/shops/friends, and, at worst, take a quick run through the rain from your parking spot to the entrance. No such pleasures for us travelling-working plebs in the UK; most of us aren’t here long enough to justify getting a car with requisite UK driving license, annual MOT and exorbitant insurance. So for us, it’s a five to ten minute slog to the bus/tube/train stop, half an hour or more dripping into your boots, in a damp chair, squinting through the fogged and streaked windows, and then back out to negotiate the busy high street, in and out, shop to shop in a black-umbrella-raincoat world.
You make the necessary adjustments. For most of the year, there is no possibility of nipping out for a quick anything. You hang your coats near the door, but if you’ve woken just in time for the garbage collection – how quickly can you throw clothes over your pyjamas, gets socks, pull your boots on, find a scarf and gloves, zip your coat up and run out the door?
Even when it’s not freezing the matter of staying dry is paramount and the best defence is a peak cap. Forget keeping the sun out of your eyes, a peak cap is rainy day wear. Umbrellas are cumbersome and unwieldy, especially in the wind (they never warn you about the wind), and in Scotland umbrellas spend most of their time inside out.
I miss Highveld thunderstorms on summer afternoons, and I miss driving through puddles on a dirt road. I miss sudden down pours and walking on the beach when the sea spray mixes with a light warm drizzle. I miss the smell in the air after the rain hits the super-heated highway at the peak of South African summer, but mostly I miss enjoying a rainy day in.
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