We Brits often moan about the rain. Well, we get a lot of it. But we should learn to love being out in wet weather, says Matt Gaw – it’s scientifically proven to boost your mood
OPINION
I remember seeing the rain coming. Slipping down the steep fell in sheets, in great greasy ribbons. Undulating. Curving. Rippling over rocks and flashing light and dark, striped like a mackerel. I watched it moving in roving, quick-eyed, hungry-mouthed shoals, closer. Closer.
There was sound, too. A growing shush that reminded me of the murmuration I watch every year over the valley fen; a mass of birds that expand and contract in a billowing black pulse of wing beats and fluttering hearts. So many the air shakes with them. Fizzes.
And then I wasn’t thinking about the starlings anymore. I wasn’t looking at the rain nor listening or thinking about anything – I was in it. I recall that there was a moment of shrinking away from it, of lowering my head, squinting; all the things we do to make ourselves physically smaller and escape the sensation of rain, before I reminded myself that I had come here for just this purpose: to get rained on in the wettest inhabited place in the UK.
Looking back now, I understand that driving for eight hours to Seathwaite in Cumbria to seek out the kind of weather usually written off as the worst thing possible – “well, at least it isn’t raining” – might seem eccentric. I get it. I’ve read the books, seen those films where the skies weep, raindrops stick to windows and slide down the glass like tears. Rain is metaphor for mood and misery. It is damp and dour. Soaking and sombre. It is the rain on our parade; it is the pantomime villain’s sibilant lisp.
But, following a summer that never seemed to let go, causing heat to ratchet to record-breaking, spit-sizzling heights and lurk like a physical presence long after sundown, I started to dream of rain and I resolved to not just brave ‘inclement’ weather but to actively seek it out and enjoy it: to explore and understand where weather comes from, how it transforms light and mood, how it shapes landscapes, language and, well… us.
Walking, running and swimming in rain – whether a heatwave-breaking storm, a shower, the downpour over Cumbrian crags, or a drizzle – has shown me that, contrary to cultural tropes, there is little sadness i
