The type of rain that gets you wet

I found myself in a conversation about the weather today, with a colleague in work. She isn’t particularly keen on grey, damp and overcast days, which today most definitely was. Gloomily, she pointed outside the window and said, “I bet you are in your element today, aren’t you?”

She knows that I enjoy the rain. I love thunderstorms, strong rain, howling wind, as well as glorious sunshine, snow, fog… well, any weather really. We often joke about the weather being ‘extreme’ if it looks slightly different than normal outside.

One day last year, at the beginning of the year, the sunlight was reflecting off the raindrops giving the impression that the raindrops were actually rising, rather than falling. It was one of the most surreal things I have ever experienced, and it seemed so calm and peaceful to watch. It appeared to be rising for at least half an hour, and I felt as though I was floating watching it. The next day the whole town was at a standstill due to the heavy snowfall that had struck the town, and the rest of the country overnight. I should have known that something was on it’s way due to the rain acting strangely, but at the time I was simply fascinated.

A few years before, snow was involved in another surreal moment that I observed… this time the snow was falling quite heavy one evening, when, out of the blue, a streak of lightning lit up the sky. There was no thunder. Just the lightning and the snow. And just the one bolt of lightning for that matter, too. I watched this with the same feelings as the raising rain that afternoon last year in work – very calmly indeed.

Back to today’s conversation, my colleague and I were referring to the rain we were looking at today – it was the type of rain that gets you wet. I remarked that whenever I have used this phrase in conversations in the past, people haven’t got what I was meaning, and simply said “It’s rain. It’s water. That’s what water does – it gets you wet!”

My colleague today knew exactly what the phrase meant. There are many different types of rain – heavy rain, fine rain, driving rain, frozen rain, misty rain, and the rain we were watching today – the rain that gets you wet. It’s almost like a mist. A clear mist that you can see – if that makes sense. You don’t actually notice that it is raining when you are out in it, but when you get back in afterwards, you tend to be completely soaked. In the ‘normal’ rain, the raindrops are larger, so you tend to get covered in spots of rain, but not totally wet, unless you were out in it long enough, that is.

So, there we have it. Just in case someone says it to you, please remember this, the complete definition of ‘the type of rain that gets you wet’. It really does mean what it says on the tin.