DON’T TOUCH THE SIDES OF THAT TENT

Rain. Rain. Rain. Let me say it again, savouring the syllable, letting it wash (ha!) over my tongue. The way it starts and ends with soft consonants. The way the two vowels lean into each other like lovers might on a drizzly stroll. A small word for a huge thing that soaks into our thinking and dampens our language. A word you can take your time with, try and find the etymology of, then start singing ‘Singin’ in the rain’ and ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head’ on an endless loop that turns like a mill wheel. The ‘n’ at the end of the word seems to land on your head like a raindrop might, soaking into your brain like rain does. It seems like a small word for such a big thing, such a life-enhancing thing in many ways, unless you’ve just got a week off and you’re halfway through that week and it hasn’t stopped stair-rodding once. In Yorkshire we say that it’s ‘siling it down’ and I like that word ‘siling’ because it seems to me that somewhere within it there is a hidden splash just waiting to soak you.

There’s plenty of time to play all these philosopho-linguistic games because, of course, it’s raining. You’re at the seaside, any British seaside, and it’s raining. Remind me, just remind me, who thought it would be a good idea to go camping in a site by the side of a railway line where the first rain-splashed train rattled by at 6am? Ah yes, that would be me. Just don’t touch the side of the tent. Don’t touch the side of the tent! Too late. The tent is weeping. The train is passing. The train is hooting. The tent is soaking.

We’ve all suffered or enjoyed those rainy days by the coast. We’ve huddled in shelters as the rain King-Leared all over the show and rolled our eyes and said, with irony so heavy you could hold a gate shut with it, ‘Why go abroad?’ An elderly lady beside you in a rainmate will laugh a subterranean laugh that dies on contact with the outside world. That tent by the railway line was many years ago but I still recall it with a shudder.

Now the scene shifts to me as a grown man with children, and the rain tropes just keep on coming. As we’ve driven into driving rain and the kids have been restless in the back seat, we’ve all pointed to a patch of sky that seems slightly less grey than the rest and said those five words that seem already doomed as soon as you say them: ‘I think it’s brightening up…’ The way those words hang in the air as though they are real.

Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to rain. The day begins as blue as a promise. You pack a picnic. You pack, despite the fact you said you never would after that greenhouse skirmish, a Frisbee. You pack a rug to sit on and there’s a flask in there somewhere. For once you don’t take anything to keep off the rain. The children are small so this is the distant time before you could check the weather on your smartphone and it would tell you exactly when it was going to rain and, if you had the upgraded app, how many raindrops would roll down the back of your neck. The weather today would have been checked on a tiny black-and-white TV in a holiday cottage or, amazingly, in a weekly local newspaper. That’s right: a weekly local newspaper printed the preceding Friday. Both those sources said it wasn’t to rain, and we believed them. Mind you, the screen on the TV was only as big as an ace of diamonds.

My parents always read the Daily Mirror but whenever we went on holiday my dad always insisted on buying the Daily Telegraph because, in his words, ‘the weather is better’.

So you walk on to the dry beach and gambolling begins. Sandcastles spring up, designed by child architects. An ice cream is eaten although, inevitably, one is dropped into the sand, flake-down. We are all so intent on our fun that nobody notices the cloud approaching across the sea. The cloud that is as dark as a slug or a funeral hat. The cloud that takes its time because it knows that spoiling a family’s day is a marathon not a sprint.

Gradually the air changes. There is a kind of fridge-door chill. A breeze touches your face a little too intimately. A single raindrop lands on your glasses like a ladybird once did. You look up and the sky is wearing its away kit. The rain begins, like a multiplication table: One drop is drop, two drops are splash, three drops are damp, all the way up to ten thousand drops which, as we all know, are soak.

The retreat begins. The gathering up of rugs and bags and spades and buckets and children. The rain falls on all of us equally and we begin to run. We’re not the only ones caught out, of course: the beach is a diorama of running and the odd bit of screaming. It’s like a deleted scene from Jaws. I shout, at the top of my voice, ‘Why go abroad?’ and this time there is no laughter from anywhere. A sudden thump of thunder rattles the sky’s frame. A zig of lightning joins a zag. Now we are all properly soaked; my shirt sticks to me and does not want to let me go. My wife’s trousers are a river in torrent. We all look like that stage of evolution when fish walked out of the sea to test out dry land.

The cloud races by and by the time we are back at the car the rain has slowed to a chunter. We open the doors and slide in, soaking the seats with our soakingness. ‘I think it’s brightening up,’ I say. There is no reply.