Yesterday in the UK it rained. A day-long deluge that gave the garden a much-needed dousing. We'd been without rain for at least 48-hours, you see, which is obvious cause for a hosepipe ban. "Quick!" cried Nicolas Whitchell on the 10 O' Clock news, "stop watering your fucking flowers before this place turns into the Sahara!"
We Brits pretend we like heat and sunshine and balmy dry summer evenings, but we don't, we hate it - we can't handle the heat, anything above 20 degrees is a comfort zone breach. Give us a non-assuming steady drizzle -- or intermittent cloud cover at the very least -- and we can all go back to our cups of tea, soap operas and dark chocolate digestives - moaning about the weather as we labour on another mouthful. "Oh, that's an angry looking sky," says Hilda, momentarily shifting her gaze from Coronation Street to the brooding clouds outside. Leave the fucking sky be, Hilda - stop cunting off the sky you miserable twat, you know you love it.
And so being a bank holiday currently, it's only expected, nay, natural, for the level of rain to be elevated from drizzle to sustained downpour, which in turn means that any time spent outside will result in the immediate saturation of every square inch of clothing, right down to the gusset of one's underpants.
It was a shame, then, that several weeks ago I had booked and paid to enter my first ever mountain bike race which was held, of course, yesterday. A hundred riders lined up at the start, all soaked to the skin before the first pedal turn. All straddling the very latest in off-road cycling hardware. All clad in apparel featuring stitchless straps and heat-welded hems. All wearing expressions like someone had just likened their dear old mum to a rabid baboon. Yes, due to the ferocity of the rain nobody was really enjoying themselves very much, and upon the starting whistle a huge amount of pent-up aggression was released as competitors raced across the field and into the woods for the first singletrack foray.
I hung back. People generally irritate me and I'm not normally one for sanctioned races and events... because it usually means having to suffer the presence of lots of other people. And on this occasion, battling to enter a 12 inch wide track with 100 snarling middle-class types didn't really appeal - in fact, I'm not sure why I entered this fucking thing in the first place.
The only problem with idling towards the back was that in these inclement conditions the trails had soon become reduced to a thick syrupy sludge which - due to my inexperience - was nigh-on impossible to ride through. Every inch was a battle. Every metre a war. Every mile a cataclysmic inter-planetary Armageddon.
Anyway, to cut a long story short (ahem) - I fell off. I fell off a fuck of a lot. The centrepiece of events being the impromptu meeting between my rib cage and a silver birch tree.
So now, lying in bed, heavy bruising to each limb, my head and torso - I decided to supplement my bank holiday wank with this cautionary tale to you ...
I guess the bottom line is move to Thailand and drink beer on the beach.