Walking in the rain. There are songs about that – I can hum a few even – and poems. I bet Simon Armitage has a stab at a stanza or two about the delights of a good downpour as he scrabbles down a muddy hillside (which reminds me, must get tickets for Morley Lit Fest). Didn’t Dickens devote a whole chapter of Chuzzlewit to the joys of stomping about a swamp in a storm? And where would Atkinson Grimshaw be without the cobbled streets of the North all sleeked with drizzle and the dazzle of gas lamps? Yes, according to art, rollicking in the rainfall is romantic and enlivening and downright sexy. Art is a big fib though.
I walked in the rain for a couple of hours yesterday. My starting point was Thorpe, a small village just outside Wakefield, and this may have put the dampeners on the proceedings, if you’ll pardon the pun. Thorpe is the very opposite of picturesque; Photoshop could not make the place appealing or conceal its manifold ugliness. There are no quaint little tea shops selling home-made vegan carrot cake, and no tidy allotments where the carrots are grown according to strict organic, companion-planting principles. In Thorpe a coal scuttle and a chimney pot are not essential items for the back door herb garden. The place is bordered to the South by several square miles of cabbage fields, and when it rains hard the pale brown run-off swills into the main road and stops all the traffic. The people who live here are old, white and working class, not the sort of people the BBC feature in fretful news reports about flood defences and damage to delicate livelihoods. When it floods in Thorpe you get your wellies on and paddle to the pub.
I’d been to see the parents. The 481, my only bus home, couldn’t get through East Ardsley, according to @MetroTravelNews, owing to a puddle you could lose a bus in, and there was no other alternative but to walk. Six or seven miles to Leeds, not normally a problem, and I set off with a spring in my step and a song in my heart.
The spring lasted less than half a mile. My lovely, lightweight, light grey walking shoes became a squelch of sodden black suede, slurping up half a pound of mud with each step. The songs lasted a little longer. I’ve a whole Wurlitzer in my head that whirrs, clicks and crackles into life as soon as I wake up, record after record from an endless collection. But even this was not safe from the rain. The valves must have got wet. After another mile there was a fizzing and then a dull popping sound as all the lights went out and the spinning disc moaned to a standstill.
Walking, so the initiates say, can induce a meditation-like experience, a feeling of oneness with the universe and a general merging, melting, erasing of dualistic divisions. Positively primal, or Oceanic as the Freudians would put it. The only thing I found oceanic about walking in the rain is the wet and cold. So primal I wanted to scream.
By the time I reached the halfway point I could have flagged down a people carrier and hijacked one of those petrol guzzling, six-seater bastards. Warm, dry, five-seat wasting bastards, looking at me with a mixture of condescension and wonder as they roar by. “Why are you walking, you should have got the bus,” they shake their heads in pity as their front wheel hits a pot hole and relocates the contents all over my trousers.
Incidentally, why are there a disproportionate amount of pot holes beside the pavement as opposed to the centre of the road? Is this another disincentive to pedestrianism, another nudge to get us all off our feet and into motorised transport? Well, its working.
As I got into Leeds I caught myself in the reflection of a hotel window. My coat had expanded, like a barrage balloon. My pants, strangely, had shriveled and were clinging to my legs; I looked like a character from one of those kids games where sections of mismatched body parts are assembled into one risible human monster, the torso of Joshua Tetley and the pins of John Cooper Clarke.
I needed warmth. I needed coffee. And toast wouldn’t go amiss, so I headed to the place where everybody knows your name – it’s written on a Styrofoam cup in black sharpie capitals. A puddle gathered at my feet as I stood in the queue. I knew I had a stamped card in my wallet for a complimentary drink but would have to copper up for the toast. My pockets yielded twenty pence short of the necessary sum and I began to tip the innards of my bag onto the counter. Seven pens of various colours and qualities, four pencils, one mechanical pencil, a box of leads, two sharpeners, one eraser, two notebooks and a random condom – a brand I did not recognise and certainly do not recall purchasing never mind using – fell out, and I had to explore every flap and crevice of the bag to retrieve the required loose change.
“No jam, plenty of butter”, I said.
The barista brought five pats of butter and a wad of paper towels, “for the seat”, she said pointing to the damp patch that was spreading noticeably. “That’s thoughtful” I smiled, dabbing a sheet over my face and wiping my glasses. “Would you mind …” she made a sliding gesture, about hip height, “we get busy soon, with other customers.”
I took her meaning to be that customers who hadn’t been out walking in the rain were rather more welcome than those that had.
The butter was frozen so hard I could have carved my name in the table with the corner of the packet. I’d dripped sleeve water onto the fruit bread. The coffee tasted like it had been brewed with overflow straight from the guttering. But at least I was out of the rain.
I snapped the elastic strap off my favourite notebook and cracked it open, intending to note down some impressions of my day so far. Something fell out from the back pages. As I was scrabbling on the floor I remembered I’d put a MetroCard in there the other day for safe keeping. Brilliant idea at the time.
“Walking in the rain,” I wrote; “leave it to the poets.”