Rainy Days

Rainy Days and Mondays was a song by The Carpenters which got to the top of the charts in 1981, the first line of which says “Talking to myself and feeling old”.
Oh yeah, I feel old, but it doesn’t need the rain, or a Monday, to remind me. I just look in the mirror.

On rainy days as a child (if I wasn’t at school), the paints always came out. Us slightly ‘less young’ citizens may well remember the slim metal boxes of a dozen or so little circles of colour with a paintbrush in a groove alongside them. Not forgetting of course the jam jar of water and loads of newspaper to protect the table as we dipped and brushed our pictures with their blue skies, happy yellow suns and over-bright green grass.

Paints at school were different though. Being powder, you had to dip your brush into the pot, then mix with water on a palette. Budding Picasso’s or Rembrandts we were not, and I got sent to the corner for trying to paint a fellow pupil’s neck when he bent over. In hindsight, I could have been a forerunner for body art design, but too young to think of patenting the idea.

I see on films the kiddie pictures proud parents put up on fridges or noticeboards in their kitchens. I remember with fondness pictures given to me by youngsters in my care. Stick families with over-sized cars and houses, very round dogs and cats, all with equally round fat smiling faces. The number of pictures way exceeded available space, but they were all given top billing at least once and for more than a day.
I’m sure I painted similar masterpieces, though I can’t honestly remember them being put up at home. I know I waited at school one Open Day for my Mum to come and see my picture on display but what it was a picture of exactly, I can’t recall.

My niece loved art, and heard me say once that I liked dolphins and whales. She painted me a picture of Orcas and proudly presented it to me. I still have it, some twenty something years later, as well as the cross-stitch she did for me because we had blue tits in the bird box in our garden. All so long ago.

I can think of very few songs about Mondays (Monday Monday, I don’t like Mondays, Manic Monday) , but a lot have been written about the rain. According to The Weather Girls in 1982, it was Raining Men but most are lonely love songs of tears, walks, and broken hearts. Perhaps raindrops are symbolic of the millions of tears shed over lost love, unhappiness and sorrow.

Rainy days today don’t envisage kids cosying up at the table with a cheap paintbox and paper.
Rainy days today bring chaos, fear, despair, destruction, and ruin every day as yet more homes here in the UK are flooded.

Somerset Levels (Google)

 

  Pictures from Google (Telegraph and Guardian)

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