I walked out the house this morning and there was… sort of… like… water! like, coming out of the sky! Really!! Where the air is normally, virtually always, dry, it was wet! I mean, WTF???

This phenomenon, I eventually recalled, is know as ‘precipitation’, more commonly as ‘rain’, often called ‘fucking rain’, especially by tennis players of the outdoor variety. Yet I’d forgotten. After the hottest summer for 2 billion years (before the ‘atmosphere’ had properly formed and long before weather girls had been properly formed), the best late summer, a fantastic Indian summer, a brilliant early autumn, and the warmest mid-to-late autumn we’ve had since the term was invented 2 minutes ago, I’d forgotten about rain. Our normal, British, accompaniment to all activities.

It was only a kind or ‘drizzle’ so I biked it to the station. But when I arrived at Embankment, it was proper rain. The big wet kind. Not nice. Ah, I have an umbrella. Everyone in the country carries one at all times. So I dug in my ruck-sack and fished out the little flip-up fold-up thingy that lives there and had lain undisturbed since about March. I pressed the ‘protect me NOW!’ button on the handle and… half of it opened. The other half was dead. Dislocated. Sprained. Dysfunctional. And I thought; ‘shit!’ But then realised that half an umbrella is better than no umbrella. Much better. You only use half anyway. Ok, a shoulder gets a bit wet but your head and most importantly, you glasses, stay dry. People use newspapers on their heads. Plastic bags (fucking planet-murderers!), briefcases, so half a brolly? In the valley of the wet the one-sided umbrella man is king.

Which immediately made me think (don’t ask ‘why’, there is never a ‘why’ in my head) about evolution. About how the human eye was always held up as ‘undeniable proof’ of divine creation. So complex, so wonderful, so brilliant, the creationists would say. ‘How could that “evolve”?’, from what? And then the killer: ‘what use is half an eye??’ Ok, we now realise that the bible-bashers had no concept that an animal that had some form or rudimentary light perception, seeing shadows of predators, whatever, would bestow a truly massive advantage over his mates who lacked such a facility and who were known as ‘dinner’.

Half is good. Half is better than none. Unless its a balloon. An airplane engine. The hull of a ship.

Happy Friday

A xxxx