When rain stops play

Facing up to the vagaries of a wet and wicked winter

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“I am Noah, and this is my wife,” announced my four-year-old son, gesturing palm-raised to the empty space beside him. Meanwhile, Mrs Noah (as she was officially credited) was still making her way to the front of the room, eagerly scanning the dimly lit church hall for a glimpse of her parents. While he waited for his co-star to take her place at his side, my son fiddled with the elasticated band of what had been intended to be a fake beard but, hanging about his collar, looked more like fluffy white chest hair.

The nursery’s not-at-all festive production of Noah’s Ark was breathtakingly ambitious, considering how many of the cast were still in nappies. Costumes hand-sewn by the childcare setting’s owner; a scale model of the eponymous ark complete with hinged entrance hatch; and musical numbers ranging from The Animals Went in Two by Two to Jimmy Cliff’s I Can See Clearly Now. 

The experience was, as you might expect for a theatrical production exclusively starring preschoolers and pre-verbal toddlers, chaotic and adorable in equal measure. 

At the time (and in fact, at any time) Noah’s Ark was a curious choice for a Christmas production. Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard to find anything particularly festive in a story centred around a mass extinction event. I mean, for anyone other than goody-two-shoes Noah and his fam, it’s a straight up horror story. And yet, there is something serendipitously salient about that story being told at this time. 

It is wet. Not your average soggy-foggy-London wet, but biblically so. In fact, you can forget the forty days and forty nights schtick, it has been hammering it down here in England for what feels like a lifetime. As I type this, vast swathes of the country sit under water. Rivers have burst their banks; fields of green lie drowned beneath lakes of brown; and many towns and villages are navigable only by boat. This most recent storm has been particularly destructive, but the rains have been here for weeks, now. Months. 

I’m fortunate that my corner of north east London has been spared, so far, from the worst of the flooding. Looking out upon my own garden, the ground, though glossy with freshly fallen rain, remains visible, at least. Still, I can count on one hand the number of occasions on which I have been out in my garden since Autumn, and later Winter, announced their arrival. 

I’m a strong believer in taking my gardening cues from the seasons, and Winter is a period of rest, recuperation, renewal. Most of the plants in my garden have either shed their leaves or disappeared underground entirely. There is no shame in choosing to do the human equivalent: wearing slippers, cosying under a blanket, sipping endless mugs of hot tea.

Winter naturally encourages us to down tools, it’s true. But the feeling I have now goes deeper than the urge to hibernate. It is a feeling of incarceration, a rolling raining curfew that prevents me from spending any meaningful time outside.

I feel disconnected from my garden. Relentless heavy rains have that effect on us gardeners. Even if I wanted to go out there, there is little productivity to be cultivated, little pleasure to be harvested. And this isn’t just the talk of a “fair weather gardener”: the soil in my boggy borders is unworkable; disturbing it now by walking or digging would do considerably more harm than good. 

There is normally a beauty that can be found in studying the skeletal anatomy of this silent space, even through the frame of a double-glazed window. But in the face of savage winds, diluvial deluges and a flat grey light from dawn to dusk that deprives us of even tracking the flight of the sun across the sky, it is a beauty that I’m struggling to find at the moment. 

There is a tendency, especially within garden writing, to remain optimistic, to see the silver lining. Winter, after all, always gives way to Spring. That’s true, and that’s fine. I myself have written at length about the positivity of the Winter period, and how lucky we are as gardeners to experience a meaningful connection with the cycle of the seasons. 

But sometimes, it’s hard to feel optimistic. Sometimes, it’s not that you can’t see the silver lining, it’s that you don’t particularly want to. Call it wallowing, call it something worse, but sometimes, no matter what the lifestyle gurus and inspirational quotes tell us, it is not in our power to be the change we want to see.

At some point in the days, weeks or months to come, a proverbial dove will arrive from the East holding in its beak the branch from an olive tree. We will find land. We will make our home. We will plant our seeds. But for the time being, as the rains hammer down from on high, the best we can do is try to stay dry. 

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Header image credit: Photo by Hannah Domsic on Unsplash