Special disco mention #14: Rain

Rain, rain, rain, rain – Beautiful Rain…

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So sang Ladysmith Black Mambazo, celebrating the stuff with unbridled joy. It’s public enemy number one at the moment though, rain – and it’s getting a very bad press indeed. You’ve got to feel sympathy for the the people who’s homes and livelihoods have been damaged by the recent onslaught across the UK, but a sense of perspective would be nice, too. Rain doesn’t have any evil intentions, it just falls from the sky when it feels like it.Thoughtless, some might say. Downright selfish, if you’re a Daily Mail reader.

It can’t win, though, can it – rain: We either bemoan that we haven’t got enough of it in times of drought or too much of it in times of flood. Maybe the root cause is global warming and we, as a species, should wake up to the changes in weather systems and start to change our attitudes towards the way we live in the knowledge that we’re fucking everything up. That would be great. But, the truth is, our harping on about it doesn’t have anything to do with that – it’s got much more to do with the human condition – namely our inexhaustible appetite for having a moan. Look, I’m doing it as we speak! 

Enough, already. What are we, fucking toddlers? We must grasp the basics of existence – that there are forces beyond our control, and those forces don’t always behave in a way we like. Sometimes they even kill us. That’s the way the universe works. Anyway, I’m going to stop harping on here and instead go outside and raise my fist to the sky and start shouting incoherently at the clouds and trying (unsuccessfully) to smash the falling raindrops into smithereens with my angry, impotent fists – here’s a rain anthem to play us out….

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