rain

We seem to have entered monsoon season here in Derby, with shockingly heavy rain appearing out of nowhere. The sound of it on the roof windows is too loud to hear anybody in the office. Anyone having to cross the yard to the other building is sprinting across to mitigate the water damage to their person.

Do we get less tolerant of the rain as we get older? I see so many people out with umbrellas, even when barely more than a fine mist is falling from the sky. It never used to bother me much as a kid though. You went out to play, pretty much whenever you could, and if it rained you got wet. No big deal. Is water really that much of a problem to adults? Sometimes I'm the only one who'll go into town on my lunch break if it's raining.

I have fond memories of going out one autumn with a friend into heavy rain, taking a set of Lego spacemen with us. They came in various colours, and I was lucky to have a "black spaceman", which was quite uncommon among my friends. Note that he was black by virtue of the spacesuit he wore, not by virtue of ethnicity; in the 80s all Lego men were yellow with Beatles haircuts and that was that. Anyway, the area back home is quite hilly, so when there was a downpour like the one I see today, fast flowing streams would form on the edges of several of the roads. We would place the Lego spacemen in the water, and we'd watch and follow as their buoyancy would carry them downstream. Such a simple game, yet it only took simple games to keep us entertained then. It ended in mild upset however, as my rare black spaceman went beyond the final frontier, over the inch-high rapids and into a hitherto unseen drain. After some fruitless poking around, I reluctantly and sadly returned home without him, but that mishap was soon forgotten, as are most childhood mishaps. He may still be in that drain, or perhaps at the bottom of a pool or something, face forever fixed in that familiar Lego smile, a memorial to happier, simpler times.

Stereotypes

As I was walking into work this morning, I passed a single mother pushing a kid in its chair. Hardly an uncommon sight for Derby, which seems to have about 3 underage mothers for every other citizen. From a distance, she looked like Stereotypical Young Mum - a bit frumpy, white tennis shoes, light blue jeans, black t-shirt, messy hair. However, when I got closer, I noticed that the black t-shirt had this (not entirely work-safe) Dimmu Borgir album cover on it. Most unexpected. Usually the rock and metal types tend not to get with child so early in life.

After work, on the bus back from town, a chav came and sat next to me, clad capped-head to Niked-toe in his finest bright white Ali G tracksuit. Uncharacteristically, he didn't give me the "filfy goffick" look that they tend to reserve for my ilk, and sat down politely. "What's this," I think to myself, "mild-mannered chav scum? What is the world coming to?" Maybe I was wrong for judging him on how he looked. 2 seconds later, his phone rang, and he answered it. Perhaps 'answer' is a bit of a euphemism here, because in reality he grunted about 8 times into it, and then placed it back into his pocket. Then at the next stop, his friend gets on the bus, and strikes up a quick conversation with him. In the space of about 5 sentences, it transpires that this chav is lucky, because he's just got away without jail after being convicted for burglary. An absent friend wasn't so lucky; he was expecting to just get tagged for his burglary, but in fact got locked up for 6 years. Yet another acquaintance has been jailed for 3 and a half years for threatening police among other things. So the guy was complaining that he's going mental because he has nobody left to hang out with, them all being incarcerated. All this in a few seconds of casual conversation, with not a hint of remorse, regret, or appreciation of wrongdoing.

Ah well, some stereotypes aren't so inaccurate after all.