Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, can you hear the rain?

There are miserable days and there are miserable days. Today is a miserable day. It began to rain during the night and we woke up to a steady down pouring and it's got heavier as the day has gone on. Weaver, a fellow blogger has snow further up in the Yorkshire Dales and on the television this afternoon, there is snow on the pitch at Elland Road in Leeds. Making it more miserable is the chill and dark grey skies.

The photo above taken this afternoon is a bit cliche but just how it feels.

How do you describe rain? I wrote on someones blog today that it had been 'chucking it down' all day. 'Belting down' is another phrase I use along with 'persisting it down,' trying to be polite.

My mother, a cockney, says 'It's raining cats and dogs.' The derivation of this is almost certainly the experience of heavy rain in olden days (17th/18th century) washing dead dogs and dead cats down the gutters in the streets - yuk.

The northern phrase we'll be used to up here, is 'it's raining stair rods.'

It's amazing how much liquid precipitation (which includes rain) dominates the topic of conversation and it's more often than not taken as a negative context at this time of year - too much too often. The poet WH Auden once said that his face "...looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain." And yet after a drought - we pray for bloomin rain. Can't win.

This poem is a common one from my childhood:

It's raining, it's pouring,
The old man's snoring.
He banged his head, he went to bed,
And he couldn't get up in the morning.
Anon

I hope you are keeping warm, dry and cosy today.

Chat soon

Ta-ra.