IL PLEUT

Rain. It’s as if God had turned on a hosepipe and is taking pleasure in watching his subjects squirm with discomfort as they are repeatedly soaked to the skin. I sit in an office, a dismal modern place in a dismal old part of the city, and watch the water flow in rivulets down the cracked and broken streets. I see people struggling with their gamps, for there is a playful breeze from the west, and watch their faces contort with rage as white vans and buses make for the nearest puddles with which to splash the lower limbs and ruin the tights of the unfortunates thus targeted. They would shake their fists or give the ‘v’ sign if they could disentangle themselves from their shopping bags and their umbrellas, by which time the van driver/bus driver would be long gone, laughing shrilly at his achievement. I say his, because women would not engage in such frippery. My mood is grim and my prospects are grimmer. Apart from the travel, which in itself is a great bind as hordes of cars launch themselves at the city at precisely the same time, there is the utter loneliness of staying in modest hotel rooms on one’s own for several days a week, speaking to no-one but the hotel receptionist and the check-out girl at Tesco’s, assuming that the branch you’re at isn’t wholly self-service. That’s not to mention the lunatic antics of my satellite navigation system, which invariably takes me through the very centre of a congested and convoluted city at the height of the rush hour. Yesterday, it took me 65 minutes to drive 1.6 miles to my hotel. When I finally arrived, exasperated and flustered, I found I was at the wrong hotel. ‘We’ve got no Hardwick here,’ pointed out the receptionist, entirely reasonably. I checked the laterooms.com papers and, indeed, I was to stay in a hotel with an entirely different name, albeit not too far away. I’ve got a full year of this, through the darkest winter, the wettest spring and into the early summer before I can break free, unless I decide to take some precipitate action, which is not beyond the bounds of possibility the way I feel just now. If I could gain any pleasure at all from my predicament, I would commit it to these pages, but there is not a shred of comfort that I can foresee. Then, to top it all, there is the rain; persistent, sly, insidious. It’s going to be around until the weekend, so I’d better get used to it.