Cloudburst

It’s been an unusually warm, dry, sunny summer in the UK this year. Most years we’re lucky if we get a couple of weeks of decent weather (usually one in May and another in September, with a constant drizzle in between), but this year June and July were pretty spectacular. In fact, this has been easily the longest spell of good weather I can remember; people have been comparing it to the heatwave of 1976, which was long before I was born, and I remember 2003 was very hot (I was 13 and had a lot of water fights that summer!) but I’ve never known a summer like this. Of course the rain had to come eventually, but after such a long dry spell it would be a relief when it did.

It happened a few Fridays ago; my last day at work before taking a week off, but that’s another post for another time. The warm sunshine of the past few weeks had been gradually giving way to a more overcast, oppressive heat and by Friday the clouds were gunmetal grey and ready to burst.

My dress (with someone prettier than me in it)

If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know that my circumstances have changed in the past few months; I’m now freelance and work from home most of the time, and as my new flatmate works for The Man I generally have the place to myself during the day. Old habits die hard though, and I still like to keep to a fairly regular schedule with a lunch break in the middle of the day. Often I’ll go out for a walk, just for the sake of getting away from the computer for an hour. Today I was giving serious consideration to an early lunch, as I was finding it hard to concentrate in the heat. I’d even given up my regular no-thought-required home working uniform of a T-shirt and leggings or jeans in favour of a lightweight denim dress with spaghetti straps and a loose fitting skirt which I hoped would might allow a bit of a cooling breeze up there, but the desk fan was doing little more than circulating warm air, which wasn’t helpful at all.

I sighed and sat back in my chair, thankful that it was covered in fabric and not leather, otherwise I doubted whether I’d be able to peel myself off it. If I was in a soft drink ad, there’d have been a close-up of a bead of sweat on my cleavage, and probably a random shot of a lizard, followed by a shot of me cracking open a can of something cold and fizzy, after which I’d no doubt have been drenched by an indoor downpour to indicate refreshment. (I nearly got a job in advertising once. That was a lucky escape.)

If it was this time last year I’d still be living on my own in my flat in Newcastle, and in all probability I’d have jumped into a cool shower, drenched myself and gone back to my desk, nice and cool in my soaked dress. Lately though, I just hadn’t had that kind of urge, even through the heat of the summer. I put it down to a combination of struggling with low mood and suddenly having a flatmate who I didn’t want to have to explain myself to if she found me deliberately soaking my clothes. Even now I was looking at the sky and wondering if I could arrange my lunchtime walk to avoid the inevitable downpour. The weather app on my phone had been promising a thunderstorm for about 36 hours now, moving it back an hour every time it failed to arrive.

I pulled on a lightweight cardigan to protect my shoulders that I had sunburnt a few days earlier, slung a little bag over my shoulder to hold my keys, phone and purse, and ventured out to the car. Yes, I was going for a walk, but I wanted to avoid the more populated parts of town. Instead I drove to a pretty little village nearby that I wanted to explore – I’d driven through it a couple of times since moving here but never had the chance to properly investigate it on foot.

Once I’d started walking, I got lost in my thoughts, as I tend to do. After a while it occurred to me that I should think about starting to head back to the car; I would have loved to spend all afternoon walking around, but I still had work to do. I didn’t want to just retrace my steps, because then I’d just be looking at all the same things I’d already seen, so I consulted Google maps and was surprised to discover just how far I’d walked! Luckily it seemed I could follow a path down under the bridge and take the old railway walk back to the car park – as the name suggests, there had been a railway there decades ago when there was a thriving mining community, but that’s all long gone and now it’s just a nice, secluded walk.

At this point I feel I ought to point out, because I know a lot of you will be very interested to learn this, that I wasn’t wearing a bra. I wouldn’t normally mention this because, although I’m lucky enough to have made it to the age of 28 without things starting to sag too badly, I very rarely go braless; I don’t feel properly dressed without one. Today, though, I hadn’t been planning to go out and the bodice of my dress seemed to offer enough support, so I didn’t bother. Once I was on the uneven ground of the old railway path, though, I began to regret this. Despite the best efforts of my super comfy Skechers, the dusty, gravelly ground was causing quite a bit of jiggling. Luckily there was nobody around to notice. After I’d been walking for half a mile or so, though, things had started to rub and it was becoming a bit uncomfortable. Without thinking, I slipped a hand inside the top of my dress to adjust myself, then suddenly stopped as I realised what I was doing. I looked around to make sure nobody had seen me, but there wasn’t a soul around, so I finished adjusting my bodice, allowing my fingertips to stray over my nipples for just a fraction longer than was absolutely necessary.

My super comfy white Skechers, should you be interested.

Straight away I felt like I had become my mother. “Behave,” I told myself, “you’re in public.” So I started walking again, not entirely sure of what had just happened but trying to put it to the back of my mind. Instead I forced myself to focus on nature: butterflies, an interestingly shaped tree, the little stream that ran along the side of the railway path. Of course, what I should have been doing was looking at the clouds.

The first thing that made me look up was a sudden feeling of wetness on my face, like I’d been splashed by something. I looked up just in time to see a flash of lightning in the distance. The storm was breaking at last, which was great, except that I was out in it and still over a mile away from the sanctuary of the car.

A drop landed on my dress, splashing into a dark blue stain. Another drop fell on my face, then another; great big, overloaded raindrops that had been in storage for a month, fattening themselves up for the day they would finally see some action. Another flash lit up the sky, followed quickly by an ominous low rumble. The storm was almost overhead. I knew better than to shelter under the trees, so my options were to double back to the bridge and attempt to take cover under it, or to carry on back to the car. I was going to get soaked either way.

As you probably know as you’ve found your way to my blog, I used to enjoy deliberately soaking my clothes on a regular basis, but with all the crap that had been going on in my life since last winter, I hadn’t felt like getting wet for months. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I’d somehow lost the urge, like whatever weird misfiring synapse that made me like this had finally burnt itself out. Now fate was about to force my hand.

The drops started to fall faster. In seconds the dark wet spots on my dress outnumbered the dry areas, and soon the clouds let go altogether and I was in the middle of a torrential downpour the like of which I’d never seen before. It wasn’t even like being under the shower, it was more intense than any shower I’d ever used; I was effectively underwater. Gasping for breath, I had to hold one hand over my mouth just to breathe without inhaling great mouthfuls of liquid, and shield my eyes with the other as the monsoon engulfed me. Any thoughts of carrying on walking went out of my head – it was all I could do to stand still and not be washed away.

Just as it seemed like it would go on forever and I could actually drown while standing there on the path, the blistering downpour began to ease off. I wiped the worst of the water out of my face, smearing mascara everywhere, and tried to catch my breath. I was utterly drenched, my hair dripping and flat against my head, my dress now dark blue and plastered to my body by the force of the rain, my thin white cardigan now pointless and transparent having offered no resistance whatsoever to the deluge. It was still raining quite heavily but I gathered my composure and started walking again. The soaked denim of my dress clung to me like it was trying to stop me getting away; my legs strained against the bottom half with each step, while the top half shamelessly caressed my breasts, arousing them, moulding itself to their shape, covering them yet showing them off as if to prove to everyone that I wasn’t wearing a bra. My dress had betrayed me.

Almost in a daze, I finally made it back to the car park. As the parched ground guzzled up the rain water, the dust on the path had turned to a sort of rust coloured ooze, coating my formerly white shoes. It would be a good idea to clean that off somehow, I thought. Maybe I was still channelling my mother and I needed some kind of justification to walk into the stream that ran alongside the path. The super comfortable, super absorbent Skechers had already soaked up a lot of water, but it seemed they could still hold some more as I splashed into the stream, swirling them around in the water to clean off the worst of the dirt. I wriggled my toes, luxuriating in the squelching inside my shoes, and for a moment I thought I might just lie down in the stream and see if I could float off, Ophelia style. I was fairly sure I couldn’t get any wetter. For once, though, common sense prevailed and after a quick rinse I stepped back up onto the path, trying not to get my shoes too dirty again on the short walk back to my car.

It was still raining when I got back to the refuge of the car, although it was hardly noticeable compared to how it was at the height of the downpour. Opening my bag to retrieve my car key, I realised the bag and everything in it was soaked too. Luckily the key still worked and I threw myself inside. I fully intended just to drive home, but as my seatbelt rubbed against my breast, restrained only by a sodden piece of denim, I realised that there was nobody around, and even if there was, they couldn’t see through the tinted, rain-soaked windows of the car. Maybe I didn’t have to go straight home, I could have a little bit of fun first. I won’t go into details here – I’m sure you can use your imagination – but let’s just say that sitting in my car, sopping wet, breathless, exhilarated and more than a little aroused, it was clear that I hadn’t lost my wetlook mojo, it just needed to be kickstarted again.