My wife has been ill recently so I have been working from home. Consequently I haven’t been on the bike as much as I would have liked.
We are coming to the end of April and thank god the rain is coming to an end. It has been raining pretty much every day for the whole month. I’m not talking about the usual English rain. No sir, I’m talking about full-on monsoon rain but without the warm weather. You could say it’s been pretty grim. Yesterday our bedroom ceiling sprouted a leak. I ran upstairs and looked in the under eaves storage to find rain dripping down onto the water tanks. That’s another expense that we can do without!
Worse than the rain though has been Amy’s terrible throat infection and subsequent ruptured eardrum. She was ill for nearly three weeks. It was horrible for her, poor lamb. Worse thing was she had to go into her work placement otherwise she would have to make up the days. In the end through she got a Doctors note, gave in, and had a week of rest. The sensible thing to do I think.
While Amy was ill I was working from home so I haven’t been on the bike as much as I would have liked. Last Wednesday though I returned to office-based duties and decided to cycle to Waterloo then catch the train to Staines. It rained lightly on the way there. On the way home I thought my luck would continue. The sun was out and I could just about discern a patch of blue sky. My luck soon ran out because halfway down O.K.R the sky turned ominously dark. Then a few fat blobs of rain fell, followed quickly by their fatter and angrier cousins. I was wearing normal trousers and they were soaked within seconds. I had to stop to stow my glasses because by now I couldn’t actually see where I was going.
Luckily I was wearing my Foska Tangent jacket which did a valiant job of keeping the water out. I decided to get off the O.K.R because the weather was somehow making motorists drive even worse then ever. I was pootling down Pomeroy Road when the wind picked up and an array hailstones started to ping straight into my face. I struggled on and half an hour later was standing in our hallway dripping onto the floor, a large puddle forming around me.
The ride post-mortem is as follows. Feet: dry-ish thanks to my gore-tex shoes. Legs: soaked, upper body: torso dry but arms wet(sorry Foska, the Tangent couldn’t handle the deluge!), head: obviously, drenched!