Rain

A rainy summer day in London. The window suddenly springs open and the curtains billow outside, the rain falling horizontally, the wind howling through hidden parts of the building. This brings back memories. Perhaps a different, somewhat more pedestrian memory than my previous post about this, of that drain upstairs getting blocked and water cascading down the stairs. Our house in Los Magallanes was a peculiar construction, apparently our granddad bought it from the council in a sort of semi-built state for it to be finished by the buyer. Which he did, he built rooms upstairs but not covering the entire plan of the ground floor, allowing for a terrace roof and a corridor where water would accumulate during the heavy summer rains. That drain just outside my granddad's room, which in time would become my own bedroom, used to get clogged up. We (ok, mostly my granddad and my sister, who was much more sorted out with that sort of thing than useless little me) would struggle with a length of wire and a sort of manual pipe pump to unblock it, while the water would cascade around and over them and down the stairs. This was a regular fixture of the rainy season, as was my sitting by a window or in the kitchen upstairs with a book open on my lap which I was often not reading, instead staring into the mist and the turbulent clouds and the occasional glimpse of the Avila mountain far away.