Will Harris: Commutable

Adjusting to Brighton’s tempests

There are plenty of things I like about Brighton. The beach. The Lanes. The fact you can walk pretty much anywhere and it won’t take you more than half an hour. The one thing I don’t like – in fact, the thing that negates all of the above – is the rain.
After a depressingly wet and windy start to the year, I’ve come to the conclusion that Brighton doesn’t do drizzle. One moment it’ll be blue skies and sunlit squares, and the next you’re running hell for leather through a deluge of biblical proportions, or pushing the shreds of an inside out umbrella into a force nine gale. There is no in between.
For me, having spent my early 20s in Brighton, this is nothing new. Anyone who’s wintered in one of England’s weather-beaten seaside towns knows to expect a certain amount of hunkering down during the dark half of the year. We also learn a number of valuable life skills, such as what knot is best for tying down a patio chair securely, or how to erect a Pac A Mac in under six seconds.
For my other half, Jack – who spent the entirety of his early 20s in zone 1, where it still rains but places to shelter from the elements are plentiful (and expensive) – the winter storms have come as more of a shock. Not long after New Year, still on our Christmas break, the two of us got caught in a sudden downpour while strolling along Hove Lawns and had to paddle home in damp shoes, arguing all the way. The argument passed, the storm continued, and the umbrella we had been carrying is now somewhere off the coast of Dieppe.

Even when inside the house, the rain presents a problem. After all, what is there to do in Brighton on a rainy day? I expect most people use it as an excuse to go to the pub, but as we’ve given up booze for January, the thought of nursing a couple of waters while yet more of the stuff lashes down outside just doesn’t cut it. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Instead, we have no option but to maroon ourselves on the sofa and stare morosely at the thunderous sky, wondering if it might let up for long enough that we can scurry to Sainsbury’s and cook our fourth roast dinner in as many days.
“Maybe we just have to get used to it,” says Jack. “There’s probably lots of indoor things we can do. Things for a rainy day; isn’t that something people say?”
“Like what?”
He looks at me blankly, then rallies. “Board games, for example. Or building flat pack furniture.”
I think about pointing out that we don’t have either of those things, and that to get them we would have to go out into the storm anyway, which would entirely defeat the purpose, but I don’t want another row. Besides which, he doesn’t have a Pac A Mac.