Blame it on the rain

In the midst of all the excitement over rainbows, Gossip Girl and animals (apparently I am an 8-year-old girl), I forgot to create an inventory of things that I dislike about London as a counter to last week’s love list. Well, I’ve given it some thought, and in the interest of being positive, I am choosing to refrain from creating such a list (for now…I retain the right to re-visit it in the future).

That said, I do need to get an issue I find particularly harrowing off my chest. While cliché and certainly not unexpected, I believe it still warrants my extra-special strain of abuse. I present: the terrible London weather.

When people first move to Chicago in the winter, we look sympathetically at their frozen eyelashes or their fingers showing the early signs of frostbite, and we say, in our most reassuring voices, “Oh, but the summer’s great.” At first, they might not believe it, but they’ll stick around for a while, and right about the middle of March (okay, maybe mid-April, mid-May) when they’re borderline suicidal over the gray and the ten comfort pounds they packed on during the winter, the sun will finally emerge from behind the clouds and suddenly all will forgiven.

For three to four glorious months, Chicago is a sunny, happy, rip-roaring good time partly because the weather is so great but probably more because it’s all relative.

Here in London, when people say, “Oh but the summer is great,” they are just messing with you, because “Um, no, it’s not. Unless by ‘great’ you mean ‘gray’ because see, the first one sounded like it had a ‘t’ and I’m SURE you didn’t mean to say that.” When someone says that to me, I want to shout at them like some sun-deprived mentally unhinged hermit, “Either you’re severely delusional or extremely mean-spirited. WHICH ONE OF THESE PEOPLE DO YOU WANT TO BE?”

The climate here essentially has two settings: 1) raining and 2) about to rain. In some ways, the former is better because at least you know you won’t be leaving the office/house. When the latter occurs, and suddenly you’re caught somewhere with a million other people trying to conduct an elaborate game of bumper umbrellas above your head, then you’re pretty much up a creek, so to speak. I don’t understand how there can be any shortage of water in the world when it’s falling from the sky here every. damn. day.

You know that standard insult-to-injury scene in a movie when the person is having a bad day and to make matters worse, a car drives by and splashes water all over them? That actually happens here…like all of the time. Here, everyone has a permanent rain cloud over their heads. I feel a little like I’m stuck in a cartoon TV ad for anti-depressants, except that the cure is sun and apparently my healthcare plan only covers the half-assed generic version. Or something.

The reason I bring all of this up is that this weekend will be the first since I got here that I can just chill out in London. Because it's summer and I’m an idealistic Chicagoan and American, I have planned many outdoor activities in an effort to force it to be sunny by sheer will alone. I don’t believe in weather forecasting (I’m sorry, but it’s not a real science if you’re only right 10% of the time…I can look at the sky too you know), so I’m going to have to go on blind faith.

Here I go: “You know, guys, it might be raining now, but the weekend’s going to be great.”