The Rain in Spain

Whatever rain gods are looking after Valencia seem a tad forgetful.

It’s a highly fertile region of Spain. Throughout the province of Valencia – of which the city is the capital – there are groves of oranges, mandarins, olives, almonds and other fruit. Fields are full of artichokes or cabbages, potatoes or carrots. As Danielle points out to me, you more or less only have to plant something around here for it to grow and flourish.

That needs rain. But the rain hardly ever falls. Though when it does, you certainly know it.

When the rain falls around here, it really falls

The other evening was the first when we played badminton during a rainstorm. All around the hall stood buckets carefully positioned to catch the leaks from the roof. Even so, there were wet patches that we had to avoid.

“Why don’t they fix the roof?” Danielle asked our badminton club president.

“Because it doesn’t rain often enough,” he replied.

Makes sense. With rain so infrequent it’s easier, and cheaper, to put buckets out.

Those long periods of dry weather, with clear skies and warm temperatures, are wonderful. Sadly, though, we pay for them with periods of intense rain when the weather finally does break. They can be ferocious: back in September, there was flooding in many parts of the province, leading to some six deaths. It’s as though around here, it forgets to rain most of the time, and then compensates with long, intense downpours.

See what I mean about forgetful rain gods? Or perhaps not so much forgetful as easily distracted.

The Cafe de las Horas: 
where rain gods would go for Agua de Valencia

I imagine them getting together for a little light entertainment whenever they can. As local gods, knowing the area well, they probably make for the Café de las Horas for a particularly good Agua de Valencia (looks like orange juice but that's only one ingredient), or maybe they go in search of an especially well-prepared paella. Then they pass their time in well-lubricated pleasure until the provincial council sends someone to remind them of their duty.

Paella Valenciana, a great Valencian invention

I picture a deferential figure, probably a man, unostentatiously dressed, with a pen in his breast pocket and an official notepad. He approaches the rain gods in trepidation, worried at their response to his interruption but equally determined to carry out his difficult task.

“Err… excuse me, gentlemen… oh, and ladies,” because Valencia being a community of liberal outlook, a small but growing minority of its rain gods will be female, with gender equality an objective by 2050, “my apologies for disturbing you, but I wonder whether you’ve lost track of certain obligations?”

This would be the approach around the 15th of a month without rain. By the 25th, he would probably have been replaced by his boss, a man or possibly a woman (see above) of more redoubtable aspect, who takes an altogether sterner approach.

“OK, fun’s over, time to pull your fingers out. We need a month’s rainfall and we need it in the next five days. Get to it.”

In response to one or other of these local bureaucrats, one of the gods might say, “oh, hell, yes. It’s that time of the month again. We’ve got to provide these guys with some water.”

“But,” another might protest, “I’ve booked us a table for a paella on Saturday.”

“It’s Wednesday. If we pull out all the stops, I bet we can get enough rain out over the next three days to meet the quota, and still enjoy the meal on Saturday. What’s more, if the rain’s done by Friday evening, we’d have great weather for our lunch. We could eat outside.”

“Let’s do it!” cry the others, “one big push, everyone, and we’re done.”

They rush outside and see to it that our badminton courts are flooded.

The official from the council would be a Rain God Reminder. And his (or her) success in affecting weather conditions would be celebrated by all.

After all, it would be a great demonstration of the power of reminder over matter.

Into every life a lot of rain must fall

It seems I’m having bad luck with water at the moment. Apparently it’s a matter of water, water, everywhere, enough to make me think.

First, as you may remember, there was all that rain falling on my head in Yorkshire at the beginning of the week. Because I had a little free time before my meeting next day, I’d carefully chosen myself a hotel out in the country where I could have a restful and yet bracing walk.

Had I done so, I would have left with a suitcase full of soaking clothes. The rain was drenching down.

Fortunately, I was about to head for somewhere far warmer and, or so I hoped, far dryer: the banks of Lake Como in Northern Italy. This had all occurred by happy chance: a colleague from New Zealand had left the UK when her visa ran out and was having to leave the country before her replacement could start. She agreed that a brief handover between the two of them would be useful, but knew she was unlikely to be allowed back into Britain so soon after her visa’s validity ended.

On the other hand, she was happy to meet our new colleague in one of the countries which she was visiting as part of a sort of grand tour before heading back to the antipodes. Italy fitted the bill. At first, our intention was to meet in Milan, but then we discovered that hotel costs had risen to obscene levels in that fine city. But in Como, on the lake to which it gives its name, prices were about a third as much.

A cheaper alternative to go to a place many would give their eye teeth to visit? Well, we didn’t hesitate.

And indeed it’s beautiful, warm and dry. At least, dry overhead. But it seems I’ve hit more problems with rain all the same. The only difference is that, this time, it’s not falling on me but some distance away: in Switzerland. Where it’s mixing in the rivers with snow melt and forcing the lake’s water level up.

So that we couldn’t actually drive to the hotel where we’re staying. The road was awash. It made me feel like a variant on the Mohammed and the mountain saying: if I couldn’t go to the lake, the lake would come to me.

That's my hotel down at the bottom.
The other side of the floodwater

It is now lapping at the walls of the hotel, making me glad that my room’s on the fourth floor. Still, it’s not terribly menacing at the moment, and most people seem to be enjoying the experience far more than they’re getting worried by it. Especially the kids: there’s something particularly appealing to a child, it seems, to be able to ride a bike straight through a long and deep puddle covering a city street.

Kids enjoying the floods

You’re on the road but in the water. On your bike. What’s not to like?

Still, it feels to me that there’s a lesson for me to learn here. It seems I’m fated to be followed around by rain, in some form or another. And like anyone that tries to outrun his fate, I am only in fact running towards it.

Still. If it gives the kids some fun on their bikes, who am I to complain?

Atlantis in the City of Serendipity

Alone in the fine old Swiss city of Basel, I felt I needed to find somewhere a bit different, perhaps even a bit special, to spend my evening.

As it happens, Basel’s a city I know well. It’s because I needed to consult documents in the university library here that I came to stay for a weeks in Hegenheim, just across the border in the French province of Alsace, way back in 1981. It was because I was in Hegenheim, that I met a pleasant nine-year-old who wanted to talk about the planets, and ended up spending the evening with him drawing a map of the solar system. It was because of that boy and that map that I met his mother. And, 37 years and two sons on, that boy’s my stepson and that mother’s my wife.

There was a place that did rather wonderful open sandwiches I knew, but it’s shut up shop and been replaced by a slightly garish bar. There was a sushi restaurant that tempted me but, hey, they’re two a penny around Europe now. Nothing special there, certainly. But then I saw a sign, on the door of a restaurant that looked definitely closed (lights off, chairs piled on tables): ‘roof terrace this way’.

Door to the sun terrace

I walked ‘this way’, following several more signs. Eventually I reached a door marked ‘Sun Terrace’. Now, that sounded special. Particularly to an Englishman, in other words someone from a country where, as a general rule, there’s far too little sun to encourage anyone to build a terrace.

I climbed a flight of stairs, then another, then a third. The encouraging signs kept urging me upwards. I emerged on a kind of high courtyard that would have been completely open to the sky had a large portion of it not been covered by canvas awnings. Another set of steps took me to the very top, close enough to the canvas to touch it, and where I could see out to a narrow vista of three or four roof tops and typical Basel house walls, plastered and moulded and painted attractive colours.

Hardly had I placed my order and wondered whether the awnings would actually hold out the rain, when the elements provided me with a conclusive answer. 

They wouldn’t.

The sun terrace turning into a rain terrace

Not much makes me proud of being British these days, since a small majority of my compatriots decided that what the world most needed was a country that turned its back on its neighbours. But I have sufficient pride in my British stoicism, and the resistance it gives me to the weather, to want to stay put despite the downpour that gradually developed above – a few drops, a shower or two, then rain, then a true summer storm, lightning and all.

The waiter was good enough to rub down my table from time to time, even wiping the surface of my increasingly moist Kindle – if I have to eat alone I do find being able to read while I do it is the only way to make the experience pleasurable. But I ate my way stoically through my excellent first course despite the increasing evidence that the position was becoming untenable.

Excellent first course.
Note the raindrops in the background

“It won’t last long,” a waitress told me, expressing what was – as I told her – my firm conviction too. Though I suspect conviction didn’t really come into it, so much as a willingness to encourage each other’s denial of the evidence.

Things finally came to a head when that same waitress wondered whether I really needed another bottle of water, but couldn’t instead just leave my glass on the table a while to see it fill up all by itself.

I retreated, Brit or no, to the slightly better shelter offered by the roof courtyard below. And there enjoyed my equally excellent second course.

It was over the chocolate mousse that I heard the waitress explaining to another client that the lease on the building was being terminated and within a few weeks the restaurant would close. She seemed unfazed by the knowledge – ‘it was very badly run,’ she announced – but to me it seemed sad that a place I’d discovered after 37 years was only going to last a short time longer. It was called Atlantis, oddly enough, and it seems I’ve merely caught a glimpse of it before it’s swallowed up by the waves.

Pity after serendipity, I suppose. But at least Basel gave me my wife and she’ll still be there when I head home the day after tomorrow. With a story about a certainly rather different – perhaps, indeed, special – dinner experience to tell her.