A couple of the city epics I’m reading right now—David Storey’s Flight into Camden and Craig Taylor’s The Londoners—get a little poetic about how beautiful it is when the rain comes down on London.
In Flight into Camden, the narrator, a woman named Margaret, gets dreamy as she looks out the train window and muses about how the rain blurs the city skyline into one “infinite” sweep of living buildings.
And in The Londoners, one of Taylor’s interviewees (Taylor’s non-fiction book gives the microphone to a giant cast of London locals) reflects on how the rain magically invigorates the city streets… “it’s life.”
Here in Seattle, where the rain is usually a pain in the ass, I did notice a lovely thing this evening during the latest spring downpour: I wasn’t getting wet.
I was dry and cozy as I walked underneath the tree canopy on the street back to my apartment, listening to the rain drops splash against the orchestra of green leaves & woodwind branches.
The Pedestrian Chronicles 