Here comes the rain again

Yes, i've been listening to my Eurythmics cd in the car.  Although like every cd that goes into the car for any length of time, it's now trashed, courtesy of the bloody cd player which scratches all the discs around the third/fourth track to the extent that anything from track two to track seven will jump/skip.

I generally only take copied discs in there now, but sometimes i forget. Ho hum.

Anyway, like the title of the song, and this blog entry suggests, it has been raining.  A lot.  Forever it seems actually.

I think i mentioned in a post earlier this year that the weather was going a bit apocalyptic...well it's doing it again.  Toby is wearing his wellies almost every day and we're using umbrellas and raincoats whilst the oodles of suncream i bought back in March is sitting in the airing cupboard melting because we've got the bloody heating on.  By the time the summer arrives, whenever that might be (next year?!) the boys will have long grown out of the shorts, t-shirts and sun hats i bought.  I have been racking my brains to think if it's ever been this bad before and i have had a sudden and vivid recollection of when i first moved to Manchester- mid July 2003.  I had a pile of mismatched furniture from my first flat in Chorley , a few tins of paint, some rollers and a microwave.  The novelty of having a friend with her own place had long since worn off for most of my friends as i'd been living on my own for almost two years at that point.  And in any case, most were staying in Chorley,  either indefinitely, or else until September when they'd be peeling off in various directions to begin their university adventures across the country.  The few that were coming to Manchester weren't coming until the festivities were starting- aka, Freshers Week.  I was early to the party.  And it was a definite case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

I spent day after day painting.  I'd get up, have breakfast, shower, paint until lunch time, microwave myself some noodles, eat them in front of Murder She Wrote or Diagnosis Murder, or Charlie's Angels, depending on what was on, then i'd paint some more, until it got dark, maybe watch some more TV or read a book, and then go to bed, and lie awake listening to the noises of the unfamiliar city.

And it rained.  It rained from the day i picked up the keys, right through to the week before uni started.  I remember that it just rained and rained and rained.  I can vividly recall standing on the kitchen counter, with a roller in my hand, painting the walls blood red, and looking out the kitchen window at my fire escape and watching the rain bouncing off it, and thinking, wow, it's true what they say about Manchester- the rainy city.

So maybe it's not the end of days.  Maybe Manchester just got all nostalgic and wanted to remind my of my first summer here.  If so, it's doing a good job.  Only this time of course, i have two little ragamuffins to entertain, which is soooo difficult when it's soooo wet all the time!

On Sunday there was a brief lull in the downpour.  Grey clouds were hovering but we decided to take a gamble and headed out to the park again.  We went to Cringle this time, a bit more of a walk for us than Greenbank but we had to get some milk from the shop anyway, and Rudy needed a sleep, and anyway the playground there is better :)

I'll leave you with the photos...

They actually make it look like a perfectly ordinary summer's day at the park, with the exception perhaps of Rudy's hat, jumper and blanket!...But just to balance it out a bit, check out the puddle at the entrance to the park- Toby had no idea what he was getting into, i mean, literally! He was pretty freaked out when he started sinking further and further in!