The Sun Did Not Shine

It's raining today. It's raining quite steadily in a rather sedate and understated way that often does here in London. It's as if the weather is trying to conform to that ever so proper image of British culture which is the typical American expectation of Britain.

This is the first really rainy day we've had in a while so, perhaps predictably, I had to be out in it running errands this morning. Still the walk over from High Street Kensington to my office was fairly pleasant, albeit wet. The rain made the pavement (that's a sidewalk for my American readers) quite reflective, and the lighting was actually rather lovely. The sky reflecting off the pavement lighting the street from below, and the fall leaves adding some vibrant yellow, gold, and orange colour which contrasted nicely with the rather neutral gray of the reflected sky. All in all, it was a surprisingly pleasing walk, and the mellow sounds of traffic and splashing water mixed well with the earthy music of Neil Young's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere album.

Neil Young typically sounds rather too American (yes, I know he's Canadian), and usually jars a bit with the surroundings here in urban London, but he worked well today. The Cure would have fit too I guess, but they didn't survive the hard-disk crash that wiped out much of our iTunes library, leaving us with mostly just the end of the alphabet to work with at the moment. I doubt whether listening to The Cure would have inspired quite such an appreciative opinion of the weather though. Beautiful, yes, but a bit maudlin.