This instalment of the blog has taken a while to write — it’s now mid-May. I began writing in April as we headed into another week of warm, sunny and dry weather; a warm spring leading into a warm summer. April was the sunniest one on record for the UK, and the sun doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.

These days, with a little more time in hand, I make an effort to join in a few community activities at the library. But most days are spent sitting and listening to people around the table talk about how alive and wonderful they feel with the blue skies. The days are warm enough to tease out a slow trickle of sweat; the nights are cool enough for quiet drinks on the roof terrace.

Then someone adds, almost ruefully: “Too bad it won’t last long. We’ll be back to rain again.”

But I’ve been waiting for the rain. Waiting for the low, grey, dense clouds to roll in and soften everything — light, shadows, moods, time. Rain makes time invisible: daylight flattens and hours collapse. You look up or out, and it could be 8am or 5pm. But, in its quiet, soaking ways, rain also reveals time. It stains buildings, softens hardened soil, rewrites landscapes. It changes how places look, and how they are lived in.

We rarely look at the rain anymore. It’s something we run through, wipe off, or talk over. We notice it mostly as disruption; a cancelled walk, damp socks, a dip in the mood. As Melissa Harrison writes in her introduction to Rain: Four Walks in English Weather: “Because it’s something that sends most of us scurrying indoors, few people witness what actually happens out in the landscape on a wet afternoon.”

The feeling that rain is dreary, gloomy, melancholic, and something one is supposed to tolerate, endure and wait out is not universal. In several cultures and landscapes, rain brings release, renewal and even celebration. There’s no such thing as bad weather; only the meanings we have attached to it. And rain, perhaps more than any other kind of weather, shows us how deeply entangled our emotional landscapes and environments are with the skies above us.

The clouds rolling in can also mean hope. As Rabindranath Tagore once wrote: “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.”

But it’s easy to miss that when rushing for shelter. Maybe when we pause, we might find the rain saying something else entirely.

Archival Encounter

In a passage from Elisabeth Fenton’s diary — written shortly after her arrival in Calcutta — there’s a moment of architectural grief:

“The rains have such a destructive influence on everything... more ruinous than centuries of neglect. The Venetian windows rot and fall out, white or yellow walls blacken, and seem like houses destroyed by fire — resting places for birds and beasts of prey.”

The rain here isn’t romantic. It’s decay, shadow, collapse. It’s also transformation. The rain rewrites landscapes into something else entirely. It stains thresholds and rearranges geographies.

Rain is also temporal. It makes history visible. It accelerates time. A single season brings years worth of decay.

Rain demands new ways of seeing what buildings and bodies are made to withstand…or weather.

Notes:

Quote from Elisabeth Fenton, A Narrative of Her Life in India, the Isle of France (Mauritius), and Tasmania During the Years 1826 - 1830 (London: Edward Arnold, 1901): 12.

Elisabeth was married to Captain Neil Campbell of the 13th Light Infantry in Calcutta, who died within a year of Elisabeth’s arrival in India. In 1828, she married Captain Michael Fenton of the 13th Light Infantry. The couple later immigrated to Australia. Mrs Fenton’s diaries were not published until 1901.

Image: Weathering and Decay in North Calcutta. Animesh Chatterjee, 2017.

Reading Now

In the midst of warm, sunny days, and totally dispirited by zero chances of rain for the next 10 days, I have been drawn into books that explore the intersections of weather, seasons and human experiences in deeply evocative ways. Rain by Melissa Harrison; Monsoon Feelings, a collection of essays edited by Imke Rajamani, Margrit Pernau, and Katherine Schofield; and Weathering by Ruth Allen, offer unique perspectives on how weather, especially rain, influences landscapes, emotions, and the passage of time.

Rain presents a deeply intimate and sensory exploration of nature and, particularly, the English countryside through the lens of rain. Harrison’s nature writing speaks through a dual awareness: the personal and the ecological. Rain — from gentle drizzles to torrential downpours — is both a meteorological phenomenon, and an entity that can renew, nourish and, at times, erase physical landscapes. In Harrison’s view, rain is not merely something we endure but, through its influences on emotion, memory and reflection, it is something that weaves itself into the fabric of our human experiences. Her walks through the countryside become meditative practices that challenge the reader to slow down and pay attention to the world around them, forging a deeper connection to both the landscape and themselves.

The essays that constitute Monsoon Feelings, while exploring the wide variety of responses — from joy and relief to anxiety and dread — that monsoon rains elicit, are all framed by the central theme of how weather and seasons can deeply affect human psychological states and cultural expressions. They show the ways in which monsoon rains have historically been woven into poetry, made visible in music, feared by those in power, and tied to cycles of renewal, hope and anxiety. The book is a profound and thoughtful collection that not only deepens our understanding of the monsoon, but also invites reflection on how weather can shape and shift human experiences across time and space.

Ruth Allen's Weathering bridges these two worlds, offering a meditation on how we survive the weather and how we are shaped by it — physically, emotionally and temporally. Allen contemplates the slow erosion of time and how both landscapes, and human bodies and minds are weathered by their encounters with the natural world. Weathering, then, is not simply about enduring the elements; it’s also about the ways in which we are moulded by them. By blending physical erosion with emotional vulnerability, Allen invites us to consider how weather itself becomes a way of understanding the passage of time, the fragility of the body, and the quiet accumulation of moments that shape our lives.

Each of these books opens a different window, but they all point in the same direction — toward slowness, attentiveness, and the emotional charge of the weather and seasons.