Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
I appreciate the irony of someone who grew up in the British Isles complaining about wet weather but I’m not going to let that stop me. Sunshine and Bahrain go together perfectly, just as UK and Ireland are well-suited to rain. Too much muddling of that natural order is distressing.
On soft days in the west of Ireland the rain is more mizzle than drizzle, making you wet by association. The sea and the sky are a uniform grey, the hills are shrouded in mist, and if you don’t believe that there are fairies in the trees with a leprechaun mending their shoes, your soul lacks poetry.
London rain holds a romance for me that I can trace back to my view of the A1 from my childhood bedroom. On wet nights I loved watching the shimmering car lights and the sparkling road, and I still get a buzz from a rainy day in London, even if my feet are soggy, a taxi has just splashed me, and my hair is doing a ‘Monica’. (It’s a Friends thing.)
But rainy Bahrain isn’t mystical or glamorous. It doesn’t make the island glisten and glow. Those empty areas that make the city feel spacious and a little exotic in a desert-kingdom kind of way, become murky wasteland and mosquito-breeding swamps.
Driving, a little dicey at the best of times, becomes hair-raising when that extra braking distance you’ve left is simply seen by other road users as an invitation.
Rather than cleansing, Bahrain rain stains your clothes and makes your car look like you’ve just returned from a hazardous expedition to the Amazon.
So I’m not going to apologise for complaining about the rain. Weather is location appropriate and Bahrain rain is just as moan-worthy as a long, hot British summer.
Thank heavens both are aberrations.
