Rain, Flog Me Harder

If I had a PR team, I reckon this is the newsletter where they'd all quit.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a mid-life crisis newsletter about how liberating it is to realise you’re an idiot science and wonder.

We’ve got mind-numbingly colossal ancient floods, impossible colours your brain still thinks it can see, the world’s tallest waterfall in the last place you’d look, some birds refusing to explode and, in the last edition, a French guy eating a bicycle. Who knows what’s next?

(The honest answer is neither of us, which is perhaps a little worrying.)

One recurring theme for EiA is: I spot something I think is quite delightful, then I work extremely hard to fit it into what I was already writing about, and then it seems I’ve just about got away with it without sabotaging my career, based on my rate of unsubscribes.

Alas, this is not one of those times. I don’t have a clever segue here. All I have for you is this video, which I’ve seen before, and every single time it makes me laugh myself silly:

(If that tickled you, try “Why the Germans Can’t Get Enough of English Markets” next.)

Now, if you’d be so kind, let’s proceed as if I know what I’m doing here, and move on to today’s main topic - returning to look further at what we like to call the Great Outdoors and what it does to us.

I

In 2020, I did something very enjoyable and also excruciatingly embarrassing in my front garden.

Everyone remembers the summer of that year, how it made us feel, and the unsettling way it slowed time down. It’s unsurprising how patchy our memory is (even though some of those patches are seared into our memories forever). And for similarly obvious reasons, we weren’t getting outside much.

But one thing I definitely remember about that summer was how hot it was, up here in western Scotland. I was living in a rented, non-insulated wooden cabin, and when the sun beat down upon it, it turned into an oven, with myself as the dish du jour. There was no escape here - the British lockdowns allowed us around 30 minutes a day outdoors, which wasn’t quite enough time to walk to the beach and go for a swim. [CORRECTION: See Melissa's comment below. Mind blown!]

At one point there was a stretch of maybe a week with unrelenting sunshine - and then on the final day of it, around 5pm, the sky clouded over, clotting with that deeper grey that promises rain. Then I could smell it - that fresh tang of ozone sucked down to ground level by an incoming rainstorm’s downdraft, as I previously wrote about here…

And then - nothing, for the next 7 hours.

But then, at midnight, the first drops started clattering onto my cabin’s wooden roof. I was, I’ll admit, a bit feverish with excitement at this. I wanted all this rain for myself. I wanted to feel it.

I rushed outside, into the darkness of my front garden. This was, in fact, the back garden of my landlords at the time - I was living in what was essentially their glorified shed, and on either side and behind me were other houses. But right now, because of this sudden stormy darkness, nobody could see me.

I was soaked through in seconds. Glorious, sensual seconds, the kind that years later can still make you blush when you think about them. I’ve never been more delighted to be so utterly sodden in my whole life. Rain-water coursed down my unfortunate excuse for a body, seeking out every nook and crevice, caressing every curve and flirting with every orifice, until it was exploring regions of me we won’t be talking about today.

Then I did - what I feel any of us would do. I stripped off, all the way down to my flimsy boxers - and then I stepped into the middle of the garden, and lifted my arms to the sky.

Did people do this kind of thing before The Shawshank Redemption? I’m sure they did, but now, that’s our reference point and we probably need to verb it.

I Shawshank-Redemptioned at the clouds.

And then the sky fell in on me.

I had my eyes screwed shut at this point - that’s what you have to do when the rain is driving straight into your face. So it took maybe a minute or two to realise I was seeing red, the red of light through the flesh of my eyelids. So I opened my eyes.

What had happened is that I’d forgotten to turn off the motion-sensor floodlight installed at the front of my cabin. It hadn’t come on when I was near the door, but when I stepped forward, I both triggered the sensor and entered its Zone Of Unfortunate Enlightenment.

For maybe 2 minutes, I’d been standing there, flood-lit, in all my unsightly, enraptured and nearly naked glory, in front of the rear windows of every house in the street. I noticed a few of these windows had now lit up - and one of them belonged to the elderly neighbour whom I’d been trying to get on the good side off, ever since she discovered me returning to my cabin late at night and rang the police because she thought I was a burglar.

Now she was looking down at me, with an expression of the purest horror I’ve seen on a human face.

We locked eyes.

And then I panicked, and waved - and then I did a little dance.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the years since. What do you do when someone discovers you more or less exposing yourself in public, and that person already has a recent history of notifying law enforcement about you? Here’s my conclusion: if you react in a normal way - say, covering your modesty with your hands and crab-sprinting back indoors - you’ll end up with a warning from the police.

But what I think I did, in attempting to style it out and failing by a huger margin than I ever thought was possible, was to push the situation so far over the line between awful and weird that my neighbour….just didn’t know what to do.

She backed away from the window, and closed the curtains - but not in a fast way, not in a “right, it’s time to get you put away for good” manner, but the way you do things on autopilot when half your mind has suddenly decided it needs a holiday, and you spend the rest of the day thinking things like, “how does soap get dirty?” and “how can I find my spectacles when I can’t see my spectacles because I’m not wearing my spectacles?”

That was, mercifully, the last time I ever saw her. But she didn’t ring the police, and after rushing back indoors, waiting for the light to go off again, and then spending nearly an hour looking up at the other windows to convince myself nobody else saw me, my life returned to whatever the hell it was before all this happened.

Anyway. Isn’t rain such fun?

II

I’m a newcomer to the world of rain writing (an off-shoot of nature writing), so the only books I’ve read that are entirely dedicated to it are Melissa Harrison’s Rain: Four Walks In English Weather and Cynthia Barnett’s Rain: A Natural And Cultural History. I enjoyed them very much, so I’ll recommend both to you.

But my love affair with rain - and it really is one, despite what it has a habit of doing to me - goes back to when I was a travel writer.

The very first piece I ever had accepted by a major newspaper was about getting lost in a rain-storm, which I landed at the San Francisco Chronicle….

And if you’ll allow me, I’d like to read a version of it out to you today.

III

Rain lashes at my back. I’ve just fallen over for the 3rd time in 10 minutes. Around me, the hillside disappears into the growing gloom, capped by scudding clouds low enough to see even in these appalling conditions. I know where I am to within 5 miles. Here on the moors, that means I’m lost. I’m self-disgusted, panicking and utterly drenched.

This is how people die.

Imagine the English landscape rendered in miniature under your fingertips. Trail your hand north along the country’s rocky spine until the Yorkshire Dales knots chaotically into the Lake District. Now east. A long, glacier-excavated scoop, which browns, bulges, rasping under your fingers like stubble. It’s like England has developed mange, and it’s this faintly cankerous-looking vista that I’ve been fighting my way across, in a storm that’s in its 6th hour.

Welcome to the North York Moors, one of England’s nine national parks - and a wilderness.

Hold on: wilderness? In England?

The land of sleepy hamlets, cream teas and nuns on bikes? Ask a non-Brit for words that sum up the English countryside and the results are predictably hokey: charming, quaint, verdant, sweeping, the dreaded “quintessential”, and, most tellingly, safe.

Our warm, fuzzy view of England is partly the result of a PR campaign started by the romantic landscape painters of the 19th century. We forget how different it was before they put brush to canvas. Thomas Hardy chose English moorland as a metaphor for fear, ignorance and savagery. Beyond the safe confines of town and village, England was out to get you, any way it could.

I’m certainly feeling that vibe now as I hunch over the pulpy remains of my map with a flashlight. In a storm, the Moors are terrifyingly nondescript. Where the ground isn’t thick bog, it’s springy with gorse. The soil up here is poor, supporting only the most tenacious of vegetation. It’s also mainly peat.

By looking at ancient pollen grains, environmental archaeologists have unearthed evidence of Neolithic forest clearances, tipping the local ecology toward peat production. Is this one of the earliest human-made eco-disasters? Despite thousands of years of inventive use (moors are terrific for grazing sheep), it’s still a barren land.

The rain continues to whip me. Frankly, I deserve it. This is a pitiful way for a world traveler to meet his end - in his own backyard. I only live 30 miles away. In good conditions, I could walk home. And yet it’s just that kind of sloppy, complacent thinking that has got me in this mess. I could not be less prepared for this ordeal. I’m a dimwit. Flog me harder, rain.

In England, there’s no escaping the word “rain.” We open most conversations with “Ooh, it’s going to rain” (a safe bet), and have an astonishing range of rain-related phrases, from “hoying it down” to “a proper shanking” or “belting” or “siling” to the glorious “Oh, it’s that wet kind of rain.”

True, our rain is rarely fierce, but it’s always stubborn. What it lacks in ostentation it makes up with relentless, cantankerous persistence.

This can be lethal.

Everyone knows Britain’s climate is mild. Sure, it’s often unpleasantly dank and we have only two seasons: winter and July (quip copyright: David Hasselhoff).

But - dangerous?

A glance over the reports of the Mountain Rescue service (England and Wales) confirms it: 37 fatalities and 667 injuries severe enough to warrant rescue in 2009 alone. And the numbers are rising. In the same period, incidents in the Yorkshire Dales National Park more than doubled. There’s a lesson here and, while lost on a hillside, I realize what that lesson is.

Anywhere is dangerous if you’re unprepared, unaware or downright stupid enough.

Even England!

For my 39th birthday, I’d decided I needed adventure. I’d never walked across the moors in one day. The forecast said “rain”; I scoffed at it. I have waterproof gear. What can go wrong?”

I thought my country was tame. And now it’s bitten me.

But even idiots can conquer their panic. I squint at my ruined map, make a few compass-assisted guesses, slip-slide to where the ground seems highest, spot a distant glitter of lights that become a road (the only road), realize I’ve been heading the wrong direction, face the correct way and trudge on. And it’s one soggy yet increasingly high-spirited hour later that I’m walking down into the village where my caravan is parked. I’ve made it.

The moors are lovely this time of year. Lather yourself up with sun-block, pull on some sturdy shoes and trousers (don’t wear shorts, the gorse will shred your ankles) and go visit. Maybe we’ll even cross paths. You can’t miss me - I’m the guy with the tent, waterproofed map and fanatically overcautious manner.

England has teeth, but I’m not stupid enough to be bitten twice.

[Footnote from 2026: I was, in fact, stupid enough to be bitten by England at least 5 more times. But they made good stories and I even sold a few of them to newspapers. Anyway, whatever the original moral of this story was, it’s long been undermined by my own behaviour. Just go and enjoy the outdoors, in whatever manner seems fruitful, and please don’t blame me for any of it. Thank you in advance.]

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Images: Ethan Ridd; Valentin Müller; Ben Wicks.