rain, rain, go away

It's been raining a lot lately.  This is, for Australians, unacceptable.  It is unacceptable because this is Australia and everyone knows Bad Weather belongs in Miserable England and Nowhere Near Beautiful, Gorgeous, Sunny Australia.  Hence, it is very Out of Character for Beautiful, Gorgeous, Sunny Australia to be so grievously afflicted.

This out of characterization happens, incidentally, annually at this time of year, and biweekly the rest of the year, but Australians are blissfully aware of this, so please don't let the cat out of the bag for them.  I'm not sure they could take it in this weather.

Rain really doesn't bother me.  I've always liked it and found it calming, which anyone who knows me must surely think of as a remarkably good thing.  I also don't like umbrellas.  I find them big, bulky, pokey and terribly impractical.  Unless it is absolutely pouring ("bucketing down" would be the verb of choice in Australia) and I'm on my way to work or also freezing cold, I'd really rather be without.

Australians, however, do not view rain the same way I do.  They view it as tantamount to a personal insult.  Not only that, they view it as "miserable," "gross," and "disgusting" weather.  This I really don't get.  Okay, miserable I grant could be a frame of a mind, but gross and disgusting?  Have they really never before encountered, say, manure?  Roadkill?  Vegemite?  These items qualify as gross and disgusting.  They are dirty and carry nasty bacteria and could seriously harm you if ingested.  Rain is none of that.  Rain, on the contrary, cleans things.  It washes the city!  It's essential for farmers and growing things and all that, too, but overall it is clean.

Acid rain is a different story.  Acid rain is nasty and evil and bad.  I'd be upset to get drizzled on by it, too, but I have been in Sydney this week and there has been no acid rain here.  Not that you'd have known that by the reaction the real rain got, poor dear.  Rotten deal, really.

Sydneysiders grumble and complain and mope and whine when there's rain.  Everyone stays inside and parties are canceled left, right and center.  No one seems to care that the rain is nice, pleasant and beautiful, or even that next week it's going to be boiling hot and muggy and everyone would like nothing better than to jump in the nice, cool ocean which is really in very many ways remarkably similar in chemical composition to the precipitation which has lately been falling from the sky.

If it were 2-week-old snow we were talking about, that got pushed around a Wal-Mart parking lot ten times over and is looking muddy and brown and altogether worse for the wear, I'd understand.  But we're not.  We're talking clean, lovely, refreshing rain.

It's enough to make Australians pack up and take a clearly much-needed holiday to England.