Who's Laughing Today?

It's going to take me a while to get going on that score, mainly because I'm waiting for my brain to catch up with my body. Or do I mean that the other way about?

Are you sitting comfortably? ( This is the phrase BBC used before starting a fifteen minute broadcast for its younger listeners in the days when I listened with my kiddywinks) Then I'll begin.

Foolishly, as I now realise, after phoning my far off family in NZ at a time relatively (get the pun?) suited to their time scale (11pm here to their 12am tomorrow) I did a final check on my inbox ... wrong move.
This had me pounding the keyboard in glee, to answer a.s.a.p some of the delights waiting within its latest sheaf of letters.

That done, I laughingly set off for bed, perchance to sleep, never mind dream. Due to the unaccustomed lateness/earliness of the hour, sleep proved no problem for once. BUT
and it was a big but, at two minutes past four the elements decided to give me a wake up call.
Torrential rain beat a tattoo on my window pane as gusts of wind hurled it at my house with all the force 80 m.p.h could muster; this had been the wind speed forecast in an earlier radio broadcast, but ever optimistic me had hope to continue with shut-eye while it blew itself out.

Hah! I should be so lucky. For three quarters of an hour it bombarded my eardrums, bringing my mind to almost full alert for the next two hours. As the drum beats of rain had lessened, I'd snuggled further under the duvet, in the hope that cosiness would lull me back to sleep in next to no time.

Brain increased its revolutions. Round and round the thoughts rolled, gathering momentum and pulling in more of their compatriots as the minutes ticked by. I tried switching on World Radio in the hope that a soothing human voice whispering in the darkness would work like a lullaby. Fat chance. The program was so interesting. I had to turn up the volume, not to miss anything! A scientist was explaining how certain types of wheat crops could reflect a large percentage of sun's heat back into space, thereby reducing global warming, over time, by a significant number of degrees.

Time signals for five and six o'clock marked the approach of daylight. Whether I truly slept after that, is debatable, but I guess I dozed to some extent, as next time I had enough muscle control to look at the clock, its glowing numerals showed 9.23. Another night had hit the dust...

You can see how RAIN had to be the subject on which to vent my spleen for today, though the ensuing words convey a slightly more congenial aspect of the wet stuff. In our first house, the wooden framed windows were made up of small squares, each approximately 35-40cm, so each segment made its own perfect picture frame.

As I sat using my sewing machine one afternoon, on the dining room table next to one of these windows, I had to stop and give my full attention to the sight that met my eyes, as another rain storm worked a different kind of magic.

Rain Music

Through the glass I watch a wind-blown tree.
Runnels of rain create a cubist painting,
as the round edged leaves refracted image
is squared and striped in perpendicular lines,
only harmony of colour unifying
distorted shapes on the glass canvas.

Orchestrated raindrop sounds;
loud bass plops of drips from the window arch,
with a mid range, staccato patter on the glass pane,
whilst in the background a high pitched hissing
of wind, rain and foliage carries the melody line
of a wet day symphony.