Sun? Forget sun – the rainiest holidays are the best
My family and I have spent most of our summer holidays dodging downpours – but I wouldn’t have it any other way, writes Ben Ross
“As he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.”
The late, great comic writer Douglas Adams conjured up waterlogged truck driver Rob McKenna for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy in five parts”. The character had a little book in which he listed the types of rain he’d encountered, ranging from type 11: breezy droplets, through to type 124: intermediate cold gusting, and type 232: bucketing down. He was profoundly miserable in a very British way, a supernaturally afflicted man for whom the lousy weather had of necessity become the only topic of conversation.
I often feel like a bit of a rain god, myself. As a pale Scottish bloke, with a pale Celtic family, I am naturally averse to beach breaks, because they turn us a frightening shade of pinky red. So we tend to travel to more temperate climes. Temperate to damp, that is. Scotland, Cornwall and the north coast of Spain are favourites. We even visited Thailand in the wet season.
Occasionally, I’ve been forced to acknowledge that we’ve spent the majority of our summer holidays in anoraks. Our most recent trips to the West Country involved a few days in Exmoor (drizzle, drizzle, sun, drizzle) and a week near Newquay (Storm Ellen).
The thing is, I don’t mind. In fact I genuinely quite like a splash of rain. As a child I remember wet Sundays as being the tolerable ones, with the opportunity to watch Burt Lancaster war movies rather than trudge to the allotment. Now, a downpour is a chance to read my book instead of going on a hike, or light a cosy fire to warm my (damp) socks on, instead of poking about ineptly at a barbecue.
So, with the hotter, drier parts of the world largely off limits at the moment, I’ll be seizing the chance to book as many trips to Wales as possible, with rain type 232 a racing certainty.
