Life During Rainfall

It doesn't seem to rain much in Texas, so when it does rain it seems all the more dramatic. It's been raining for three days solid. There have been breaks during which I've zipped out on the bike and ridden the usual twenty miles. I kept the waterproof jacket and trousers which came with the job at Royal Mail, and they're enough to make the ride bearable under conditions of light to moderate rainfall.

Life has gone on as normal for everyone except the cats. Where most of them go out to attend to cat business during the hours of darkness, they've been stuck inside these past few nights. I am greeted first thing by a front room full of irritable felines, and usually a couple of protest turds strategically laid at the traditional locations. Nibbler is the worst, marching up and down, hissing and swiping at everyone and everything as though a couple of hours in the company of other cats has been too much for him; so I let him out, although it's not like he's going anywhere given that it's still raining.

Our internet connection fizzles out on the third day, just as it always does. Rainfall destroys our internet every time, and I still don't understand why. We jump through the same hoops over and over, and it's always due to some junction box a few blocks away. My theory is that our internet is beamed directly to this junction box, and that the signal is quickly baked into tiny pies by magic pixies so small as to be effectively invisible. The pixies then convey these pies across a small lake the size of a penny, to a receiver. The pies are fed into the receiver, and from that point on the internet comes directly to our house, enabling us to watch Wheel of Fortune without it resembling a Nine Inch Nails video. When it rains, either conditions on the small lake become so treacherous as to prevent the magic pixies crossing, or else causing the pie crusts to dissolve in transit.

Nevertheless, we phone the help desk.

'You need to turn the modem off and then back on again,' the lady suggests.

'Why not?' I say. 'We've already done that three or four times, but maybe the fourth will be the one which effects a magical transformation.'

'She can hear you,' Bess hisses, indicating that she has her smartphone set to speaker.

'I know,' I smile. 'That's why I said it.'

We turn the modem off, and then back on again. We remain without internet, and I imagine losing a limb to a chainsaw, phoning the hospital in agony.

Before I submit the ticket, could you first try walking around the room for me?

Then, did that fix the problem?

They're going to send someone out tomorrow morning. There will be a phone call first thing asking me to confirm that the internet hasn't just grown back of its own accord, and that I still require assistance.

No Wheel of Fortune for us tonight.

We watch a couple of episodes of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation on DVD. It's interesting, but two hours of Kenneth Clark is more than enough for one night, and besides neither Bess nor myself fully agree with his definition of what constitutes civilisation. Also, I'm disappointed at the free pass he's given to certain fucking awful examples of overly sentimental eighteenth century painting, given the opprobrium he heaped upon significantly less offensive works in the previous episode.

I look through cupboards full of DVDs and notice Mamma Mia! 'How about this?' I ask.

'I hate that movie,' Bess tells me.

'I know. We could watch it and take the piss. I've never seen it.'

'Well, I guess…'

We wait for the thing to load.

Her first husband gave my wife the DVD for Christmas, despite her having told him that she had hated the film. He also gave a copy to his friend Karen Eliot* that same Christmas, so it was probably some kind of two for the price of one deal. It later emerged that he'd been knobbing Karen Eliot on the quiet, all of which partially accounts for why he is no longer married to my wife.

We watch about twenty minutes.

It's basically Four Weddings and a Funeral with more exotic locations, all floppy haired Englishmen exclaiming gosh and laying on the self-deprecation with a silver-plated trowel. It's the story of a girl whose father could be any one of four mysterious photogenic men - Colin Firth and Piers Brosnan amongst them - seemingly implying that her mother was pulling a train at the time of conception; and every couple of minutes they all foghorn and bluster through a song by Abba so as to illustrate some point or other.

I've never felt particularly protective of Abba, but I liked them when I was a kid.

'This is awful,' I announce. 'I don't think I can watch any more.'

We switch to Kath & Kim DVDs and I let another cat out, this time Kirby who pads onto the back porch and concludes that yes, it is indeed still fucking raining. She looks back at me.

'I don't know what you think I can do,' I tell her. 'My powers are limited.'

Every time I open the door I hear the white noise of rain and the constant drip as it sluices from the roof into puddles. It's been three days and it's getting a bit much.

Next morning, I'm still at home. I can't ride the bike even though it isn't raining.

The guy turns up at eleven, fiddles around for a while, then concludes that the problem is indeed with the junction box and those magic pixies - or however it works. He's going to call the people who fixed the same problem last time, and the umpteen times before, and they'll get it done just as soon as they can. It should take an hour.

Four hours later, we still have no internet connection.

I walk to the supermarket to pick up some cat food. I've been using my Sony Walkman again, now that I have all of my cassette tapes back. I'm listening to something Andrew taped for me back in the late nineties, a mix of Dinosaur Jr., Tad, Eleventh Dream Day, Pavement - all of those American guitar bands he used to like so much. Andrew died in 2009, and here I am listening to his tape of American music whilst actually in America. Not for the first time, it feels as though I'm in a film, and the sun is out at long last.

*: Name changed so as to protect the not even remotely innocent.