This summer morning, it rained hard. Rain that transported me home. Not the usual London attempt—apologetic but persistent, gentle but irritating—but rain that puddled fast, bounced off the pavement, overflowed guttering and gushed, then burst drains. Sub-tropical style rain. Real hard rain that smells good.
On the tube, the commuters were damp and steaming, clutching dripping umbrellas. One man’s dark suited shoulders were dusted with raindrops like dandruff. A woman sat, legs slightly apart. Her hair was parted in a firm separating line, combed flat, weighted down with gel or spray but it kinked, turning up at her neckline, like the rain had encouraged a rebellion amongst her repressed curls.
One young man who had neither raincoat nor umbrella was shining wet, and a single rain drop hung from his earlobe, a Vermeer’s pearl earring, making him glossy and beautiful. Mesmerised I stared until he glared back at me, and I looked the other way.
When I arrived at my station, I felt so anxious to be in the rain again, to smell water on warm asphalt and metal and concrete. To smell rain in trees and grass and to see it cascading from awnings, running off roads.
When I burst out of the station the rain had stopped, and I felt such a keen disappointment that I knew it was time. I needed to travel 12000 miles back to the place that is truly my home.
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