It's raining, it's pouring...

It’s raining, again. This week the floods in the Lake District have made me realise that these Scots have secretly been imbuing me with their malevolent attitude to English weather. 

The first, innocuous sign of this, passing unnoticed at the time, was when my family moved up to Fife from Hertfordshire.  My youngest brother, J, was unimpressed by this relocation, and spent the last lonely days of his school holiday marking of the days on which it rained.  He counted twelve out of fourteen before he returned to school and found less constructive things to do with his time. My response was ‘yes, but on how many days did it rain down South?’


From that, I should have seen it coming.

Since then I’ve come to see it as a particularly Scottish variant of stoicism. To commit the sin of generalisation, the English attitude to the weather could be summarised as “well it could be worse, maybe it will brighten up later, at least it’s not as horrid as yesterday…”

In Scotland, however, the train of thought goes like this “heh, et mait be pessin’ et doun here, but et’s flowddin’ doun Sohth [it might be pissing it down here, but it’s flooding down South]”.  No-one says this out loud, but you can tell that’s what they’re thinking. And this week, I’ve been forced to face facts: I’ve caught the meteorological malevolence disease!

It seems that any number of Scottish storms and gales can be borne if England is facing worse conditions.   Last year when London came to a standstill for weeks in the snow, the Scots were sniggering behind their scarves.  When that half-panic developed as local authorities south of the border were about to run out of salt for the roads, we looked into our full plastic yellow bunkers and laughed. Not only were we better prepared for the winter, we were also enjoying milder weather.  I’ve never seen some of these Scots so cheery.

Maybe I’m not actually becoming Scottish though. Perhaps my one-upmanship is actually symptomatic of English upbeatness in the face of adverse circumstances? Perhaps. I might be no more Scottish than I was before I’d moved up here, and it’s just a coincidence that my reaction to the weather is manifesting in a similar way to that of the Scots.

Och aye, that must be it.