The Cornish Have Over Five Hundred Words For Rain

 Don’t unplug the jukebox

There’s time for one refrain

And if we miss the night bus

We can walk home in the rain

 

Statistically there are over twice as many pop songs written about the rain as there are about the sun. (Don’t ask for a citation, this is not Wikipedia). That Beatles song is just an outlier. Misery loves company.

Lately I’ve taken to walking in the rain. I don’t have much choice. I consult the local weather forecast and study the radar maps in the hope of finding a break in the clouds, but when the next dry day is predicted to be four weeks from next Wednesday you just have to give up and get on with it.

Once you’re soaked through, it’s not so bad. You might as well just keep on walking. I like to wear sunglasses when I go out. It’s taken many years, but I feel I’ve refined my sense of irony nicely at this point. The glasses get wet, steam up and everything becomes blurry.  I sort of like that. (There’s a great line in the film Amores Perros where an old man, a former revolutionary who’s now living on the streets, has lost his glasses. In resignation he simply tells people: "If God wants me to see blurry, I'll see blurry".)

So if it’s constantly raining, why go out at all? Well I need to walk at least once a day for health reasons – not so much my physical as my mental health. It also gets my brain into gear. It gets me thinking. And then I come back and write stuff like this. It’s a win-lose situation. A win for me. A lose for anyone else who has to read this.

Cornwall does get a lot of rain. I’ve lived here for nearly thirty years. For over half my adult life. Broadly speaking it rains in the winter and sometimes in the summer it also rains. Last summer we went almost five months without a drop, but that’s a bit of an outlier. Dry spells aren’t uncommon and they're probably designed to lull you into a false sense of security so you can be thoroughly depressed all over again when the rain sets back in.

The other problem Cornwall has is that it doesn’t snow here. Snow is fun rain. Snow is rain for kids. When my Canadian friend was living with me in Penzance, it snowed briefly for a couple of hours one November afternoon. All the local children poured out on to the streets and started scraping snow from the tops of cars so that they could have snowball fights. There were even cries of ‘It’s Christmas!’ from one of them.

A few hours later you wouldn’t have even known it had snowed. Contrast this to Montreal in Canada where the snow can arrive as early as the middle of October and still be settled in the streets by April. I’ve experienced Canadian winter. I’ve walked the streets in minus 29 degrees. You don’t want to hang around in temperatures like that, but if you keep moving and the wind isn’t blowing right through you it actually doesn’t feel that bad. Cath complained that British winters were actually worse because we get a damp cold here and that feels more uncomfortable than the Canadian cold. She probably has a point.

When American band The Walker Brothers became successful in the UK, they had to move countries to capitalise on their success. Ironically their biggest hit was of course The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore). They were from the west coast of the US and the climate here must’ve been as alien to them as if they’d been transported to Mars. The climate meant they were perennially sick. When they broke up a few years later, their drummer (Gary Walker, née Leeds) formed a new band and named it Rain. He was probably making a point about our climate, but who knows?

So, as established, Canada doesn’t have a rain problem. Not on the East Coast anyway, Vancouver is a different matter. But what about New Zealand? Often considered to be our Southern Hemisphere cousin. I spent five weeks backpacking across pretty much the whole country when I was in my early 30s. I saw very little rain. I got lucky for sure. There’s a region of the west coast of the South Island that’s called Westland and is known by the locals as Wetland. Out by Fox glacier there’s a lake that offers amazing reflections of the nearby Southern Alps – a mecca for photographers to head to, particularly at sunrise or sunset. I read somewhere that on average you only get three days a year when the sun is out, enabling you to take the perfect photograph. And I was lucky enough to experience one of those days. The picture I took used to be the wallpaper on my computer at work, back in rainy Penzance.

It did rain a couple of times during my trip. I even wrote a song called Dunedin in the Rain to commemorate one of those days. (And to aid the statistical point I made at the start of this piece). But I definitely got lucky. It does have a lot similarities with us when it comes to climate.

So where’s the happy ending in all this? Can I find one if it’s still raining outside. If damp is just the default for my life. Well maybe it will be climate change. Climate change is warming the planet, but it’s also having a lot of knock on effects. One of them could be the loss of the Gulf Stream. You see we actually inhabit a similar latitude to Montreal. Without the temperate effects of the Gulf Stream our climates might soon align. The UK will get much colder winters. Like the ones I grew up with in the 1970s, or worse. Even here in Cornwall we might finally replace months and months of damp with a surfeit of snow.

Every cloud – and there are more than enough of them to go around – has a silver lining. Bring on the fun rain, that’s what I say.