By Alex Allen
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There are certain things in life that I've come to accept that, although they aren't nice, are just unavoidable. Things like paying the electricity bill, applying for a new passport and being charged an extortionate amount to take your cat to the vet. But then there's rain. It seems to me that in a modern world where we can do all our shopping from a computer, carry out heart transplants and other complex surgery and travel from England to France in a channel under the sea, surely we can do something about the rain. At the moment our best solution is some kind of portable roof, we try and dress it up with impressive terminology, the 'umbrella', but a personal roof is essentially what it is. Is it windproof? No. Do you end up getting wet anyway? You bet you fucking do. I dream of a world where we don't have to put up with getting drenched, in fact, since it's a dream, let's get rid of all the bad weather. Hail, gales, slush, enough's enough. Everything about rain is unpleasant. Looking past the fact that it feels cold and makes you wet, it has the effect of making you turn up to wherever you were going looking like some kind of wet dog. And it doesn't just happen on any day, either. Job interviews, formal occasions, meetings, these are the kind of days we can expect rain. Yet somehow, inexplicably, nobody else is ever wet. Somehow, you turn up to the office and find that everyone else is completely dry, like they've taken some kind of underground tunnel to work. It's a weird thing, it's only OK to be wet outside, that's where the water falls. Suddenly, when you're indoors it's no longer OK to be wet, now you just look like an idiot. Without the rain, there could be any reason for it, you could have just had an unfortunate incident with a water cooler. Every now and again someone will walk in to office soaking wet, and nobody will bat an eyelid. This man, however, thinks his soaking clothing is big news, so he will stand by his desk spluttering and staring at his suit in disbelief until someone eventually feels obliged to ask if it's wet outside. I despair.
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And then there's the process of acknowledging rain. In school, college, university, the office, anywhere really, there is always a rain monitor. Watch out for them, it's a formality, they will be there. These people will take it upon themselves, appoint themselves, to inform others that the weather has turned and the rain is falling. 'Ooh, it's really coming down outside', is the sort of thing you can expect to hear, as if it's brand new, unheard information, despite the world outside the windows in the building you are in being visible to everyone. Even in an office I worked in which was surrounded by glass walls on two sides someone said it. I don't know if there is some sort of rain monitoring organisation where these people congregate and discuss, well, rain I imagine. I assume they would spend their meetings swapping hilarious anecdotes and reminiscences of rain, and compile rotas of different regions and the schools, workplaces, shops bars and cafes within them so as to spread their members evenly across the country. Of course, I have no solution to this problem. I did briefly have some kind of giant, transparent funnel concept that we would just use to catch all the rain, but quickly realised it was stupid and wouldn't work for various reasons. Frankly, I'm not even really sure why I mentioned it, it certainly doesn't improve my credibility as a writer or, come to think of it, a human being.
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