The Rain in London Falls Mainly on Me

This weekend I woke to two sunny, spring days. The sun was shining, I imagine somewhere there were birds chirping, and the temperature was only mildly cool. On Saturday, still feeling quite ill from my lingering illness and thinking that going running at the gym might not be the best idea, I decided to walk up King's Road into Chelsea to go dress shopping. After the initial blasts of arctic winds, things calmed down a little bit and all was well and good. I had somehow managed to convince Mark to come, and we stopped in the Chelsea farmer's market to look over the amazing food they have on offer and lunch time and got some pleasant sandwiches, eating them while basking in sunshine. Again, all very spring-like.

A few stores later, I looked up at the dark sky and assumed we must have been getting on a bit in the afternoon. When I looked at my watch to discover it was only 1:30, I got a bit worried. Low and behold, while we were in John Lewis, we missed the majority of a rain shower, leaving just as the last drops were falling. Thinking we'd triumphed over adversity, we decided to start walking back. After not too far, it started to rain again. Quite profusely. I had promised Mark I'd buy him a coke in a pub after having dragged him to about 10 stores to look at dresses, but needed cash. We therefore passed a couple of nice pubs in the rain as I was looking for a cash machine. It eventually stopped raining just as we found a cash machine and then a pub.

Again thinking we had seen the worst of things, we continued on our way back home. It's a long walk, I'd say about an hour from the John Lewis end of the shopping street, thus allowing for seemingly endless variations in the weather. Let's just say the heavens opened up about 5 or 10 minutes from the actual Parsons Green, and despite my umbrella, we still ducked quite soaked into another pub, thunder rumbling in the distance. A moment later a giant flash of lightening and the quick succession of the thunder assured us the storm was right above us. GREAT. It stopped raining, we left, it started raining again. That sort of thing. It was not ideal.

Not feeling that well yesterday, I stayed behind while Mark went into town to try and meet up with people around the end of the marathon. He stood for 20 minutes getting soaked in the rain without being able to get a hold of anyone, turned around and left. It had been nice when he had left the house, and it was nice when he returned, just not in between. In the evening we headed to our local pizza express to use our buy one get one free coupon. Needless to say, after embarking on a calm evening, we returned huddled up under the umbrella as the heavens hurled down around us.

So what's my point exactly? That it rains in London? No, that I was prepared for. Nice Pacific Northwest kind of rain. You know, the kind where you wake up and it's cloudy all day and maybe some rain leaks out for a few minutes before it just goes back to being cloudy. I was not prepared for the quick Florida-style changes in weather that resulted in apocalyptic downpours and window-rattling thunder. I hate to break the news, but they seem to have a bit of the worst of both worlds around here... the constant cloudiness of the northwest and the stormy downpours of the east. Oh, and let's not forget the April snow. The only thing that's missing is, um, what's it called?? Oh yeah, the SUN. And they say we're in for a wetter than average summer too...