Come rain, come shine

Lynne Patrick

I was going to write about the 100^th birthday party I went to last weekend, until I read PJ’s post about floods in Texas and power outages. It sent me right back a couple of years to that dreadful ‘summer’ when people were being rescued by helicopter from factory roofs, great swathes of the UK were under water and Shaz was queuing for her supply of bottled water.

 

Nothing quite so dramatic has hit us since then – but it’s surprising how often the weather gets blamed when things don’t go quite according to plan. We’ve all had a good laugh about leaves on the line and the wrong sort of snow; railway honchos and their ilk would much rather blame the weather than actually sort the problem.

 

(Though that 100^th birthday party has its own take on the subject. The guest of honour was a delightful gentleman I’ve known for close to twelve years. Until recently his friends and family threw him a party for every birthday – and every single year, whatever the weather chose to do on either side of the big day, that party took place in his garden, in brilliant sunshine. Maybe when you reach a venerable age, one of the perks is a direct line to whoever arranges these things… We can but hope.)

 

OK, that’s this week’s digression done and dusted; I’m back on message now.

 

We did a murder mystery evening at the end of last week, at a small village library on a pleasant though unremarkable evening. There were six teams of participants, and everyone had a good time – and at least a dozen times in the course of three hours, somebody said, ‘Thank goodness this wasn’t happening last night.’

 

The previous night, a month’s-worth of rain had fallen over Derbyshire in less than twelve hours. When I got home from work, my t-shirt was plastered to my body (and I don’t have a wet t-shirt contest body) and I had to towel off and change my clothes – all the more significant when you remember that my office is a thirty-second sprint from my kitchen door. News coverage showed flash flooding, cars half-full of water and lightning like something out of a Frankenstein movie.

 

The kind of evening when you lock the door, pull the curtains and curl up with a good book.

 

Not the kind of evening when you venture out into the wild blue yonder, or even the local library for a murder mystery evening, even if you’ve paid for your ticket.

 

So yes, on the whole, thank goodness it was actually scheduled for twenty-four hours later.

 

I may have mentioned once or twice in passing the bookshops visits that several of Crème de la Crime’s wonderful authors undertake on a fairly regular basis. That the number of books that leave via the cash register has a strong connection with the number of customers who pass through the shop goes without saying, though I seem to have said it anyway – don’t you just hate it when people do that? And the number of people in the shop seems directly related to – yes, you guessed – the weather.

 

Trouble is, it’s not one specific kind of weather that keeps them away. If it were, the author could simply stay at home – having first contacted the shop to reschedule, of course. OK, maybe snow. It invariably paralyses public transport and sends town centres into gridlock, so maybe cancellation is the best policy there.

 

But rain coming down like stair-rods isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. It can actually send people into a bookshop seeking shelter. I’ve done that myself, and since I’m not safe to be let loose in a bookshop with a Visa card, any author who happened to be visiting could well have profited from my desire to stay dry.

 

At the opposite end of the scale, blazing sunshine, which you’d think would entice people out of their houses, often results in deserted shops, even if the outdoor temperature gets uncomfortable and they’re air-conditioned. Other pleasures obviously beckon.

 

And neither effect is predictable. The opposite could just as easily happen.

 

So what’s the point of this frivolous riff about something we can’t control?

 

Just that: we can’t control it. (Unless we’re a hundred years old with a direct line to the weather fairy. Roll on the day.) We’re at its mercy. And we have absolutely no idea what effect it will have.

 

Like so much of life.

 

Scary.