“Ninety-nine words for rain in Irish?” Manchán Magan wrote in The Irish Times a few weeks before his tragic death, last October. “Certainly, Ireland can seem like a rain-washed land, and our language is known for the profligacy of its vocabulary, but 99 words seems excessive.”
Magan had already gone some way to confirming the claim in his book Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun). After the past month, that scarcely seems enough. So relentlessly miserable has been the weather that even the most pinch-mouthed Ulsterman – the sort that bellows at the summer sun if it dares to show itself for more than an hour – finds himself yearning for a moment without precipitation.
I have had to buy waterproof trousers for the bike – plastic trousers, like something an infant might wear over his nappy. This is what the unstoppable blast has done. Stripped me of dignity. Had me miss the sun. And I hate the sun.
Then again, the notion there might be 99 words for what we’ve been enduring since mid-January does the current unpleasantness more favours than it deserves. It is appalling for those rendered homeless by flooding. It is wearily inconvenient for the rest. But it rarely skirts the epic malevolence summoned up by Flann O’Brien in the immortal The Poor Mouth.
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There he mentioned “the roar of the water falling outside from gloomy skies, just as if those on high were emptying buckets of that vile wetness on the world”.
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The consistency of the 2026 misery puts few strains upon the lexicon. Nobody will bother making art about this conflagration of petulant cyclones.
Which brings me to the core. What a useful thing rain has been to writers, film-makers, musicians and poets. However often critics bemoan the “pathetic fallacy” – the attributing of human emotions to nature – creators still launch “miserable” or “unforgiving” rain at their characters at times of distress.
You will see a fair bit of that in Emerald Fennell’s new film of Wuthering Heights. Both Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Four Weddings and a Funeral bring the uncertain lovers together in a closing downpour. “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed,” Andie MacDowell says, as the thunder rumbles, in the latter. She doesn’t notice because Hugh Grant is such a ride, you see.
Rain does all kinds of things in popular music. In The Beatles’ magnificent Rain – arguably their best B-side – it acts as a damp gesture towards the state of psychedelia. “Rain, I don’t mind. Shine, the weather’s fine,” John Lennon sings.
We pass by Prince’s Purple Rain, as that seems to have even less to do with literal rain than the Beatles song.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, written as the cultural revolutions of the 1960s curdled into 1970s cynicism, is among many works that sees rain as the ultimate party spoiler. “I want to know, have you ever seen the rain coming down on a sunny day?” John Fogerty asks of a United States that has just elected Richard Nixon.
That green-lawned, two-fridge US was, in the same year of 1971, wallowing in the crystalline sadness of The Carpenters’ Rainy Days and Mondays. Again, rain is a depressive. “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” Karen Carpenter sings. Try a whole month of it.
Elsewhere, rain is used to indicate near-apocalyptic gloom rather than mere afternoon inconvenience. Think of the constant polluted downpours that follow Harrison Ford around in Blade Runner. Look back to the carnival performers crawling through the pelted mud in Todd Browning’s Freaks, from 1932, as they seek revenge on a doomed betrayer.
One can hardly imagine more symbolically loaded rain than that which hammers around a newly mad King Lear. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples,” he bellows. Tell me about it, your majesty.
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What to make of two of the greatest masterpieces by Andrei Tarkovksy ending – or nearly ending – with impossible indoor rain: eerily in Solaris (1972), more hopefully in Stalker (1979)? When you live through Russian winters, rain may seem a less daunting, more flexible phenomenon than the icy alternative.
It matters where you are from. Rain means something very different in southern California from what it means in Tarkovsky’s former Soviet Union, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire or – recalling the untouchable rain-blasted climax to The Seven Samurai – Akira Kurosawa’s Japan. Even at their most torrential, showers often come as relief in Los Angeles.
This needs to be considered when watching the most celebratory meteorological fantasia in cinema history. You know where this is going. Sitting in my plastic trousers, chugging chestily on Lemsip, I don’t feel in the mood for Singin’ in the Rain. Lawrence of Arabia is on the other channel. That will do nicely until sanity returns.
