Here Comes The Rain – Again

“Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory”

Yesterday it rained in Singapore. Of course, that sentence could have been equally true almost everyday in the past few months; or so it seems. It’s raining often and hard here and, to be frank, the rain is getting me down.

Today I took the iPhone image you see above as another rainstorm blew past my home. It was accompanied by thunder; serious and loud thunder of the kind that will shake you in your seat if you’ve relaxed enough to forget that the wrath of the clouds is looming all around you.

Of course, that’s not what is getting to me – I love thunder and I love lightening. Having grown up near the beach in Sydney I have a fondness for electrical storms. They make me feel, well, maybe not safe, but certainly at home. If there’s something I miss about living in Sydney it is driving to seafront to watch the Southerly storms roll in; great balls of light unravelling themselves, from the clouds to ocean and one cloud to another.

In Singapore it’s not the thunder and lightening that is wearing on me, it’s the rain. At this time of year, the afternoons seem to get prematurely dark as the grey clouds settle in almost every afternoon. And, during the day the rain interrupt everything, from morning walks to lunchtime excursions. It rains often – and hard.

When I lived in London (and in the years since) I often heard people complain about how depressing it was to live with cold, grey weather. In a less dramatic way, I heard similar complaints about winters in Hong Kong, where although the weather is nowhere near as cold as London, it can often be grey and cool for weeks on end.

Neither place got me down, partly because I love cold weather. But, mainly because the weather never really got in the way of getting out and doing stuff. London winters only really mess up your plans on the rare occasions when it snows (and then everything just shuts down). Hong Kong weather is more erratic, but the main disruptions come earlier in the year, during the typhoon season. However, typhoons usually pass in a few days and the weather that follows them is often glorious.

But, this gloomy spell here in Singapore is getting to me. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve had a cold, just came off the high of an amazing spell of travel and have started to wonder if my plans for 2012 are just a little bit too crazy. Still, anything that gets me humming the song I quoted above (an 80s hit by British band, The Eurythmics and one of my most disliked songs of the era) is not good.

So, as the five month anniversary of my move to Singapore passes, it is the rain that has gotten under my skin the most. Of all the things I planned for, in moving to Singapore, I never had a plan for coping with such frequent rain.