The Rainbow, the Rain, and the Day the Allotment Finally Had a Proper Drink

 I want to talk about Thursday. But before I get to Thursday, I need to tell you about Wednesday night, because without Wednesday night, Thursday doesn't make half as much sense.

Wednesday evening, the weather forecast had been muttering about rain. Not just a shower, they said. Proper rain. The kind we need, they said. Well. I have been gardening long enough to know that weather forecasters and allotment holders have a complicated relationship, somewhere between cautious optimism and mild ongoing betrayal. They mean well. I'm sure they do. But we've had quite a week of storms up to that point — short, sharp, biblical-looking things that roll in with tremendous drama, rattle the shed roof, drop a bit of hail on the courgettes as if personally offended by them, and then disappear again in ten minutes flat. The ground barely notices. You walk up the plot half an hour later and it's as dry as a Lincolnshire joke. Which is very dry indeed.

So when Wednesday night came and the sky went black and the thunder rolled and the rain hammered down and the hail bounced off the works window like it had a point to prove, I thought: here we go again. Ten minutes of fury and then nothing. I was already composing the mildly disappointed face I use on these occasions.

But then the storm passed, and I looked outside, and I stopped composing any face at all.

Because there, sitting absolutely brazenly at the end of the road, was the most vivid, most extraordinary rainbow I have seen in sixty years of looking at the sky. And I have seen some rainbows. I like to think I'm a man who appreciates a good rainbow when one turns up. But this. This was something else entirely. Every colour absolutely blazing — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet — sharp and clear and so intensely itself that it looked almost unreal, like someone had turned a colour dial somewhere and then snapped it clean off. And the end of it — now this is the part you're not going to believe, but I'm telling you it's true — the end of it was there. Just there. Not off in the vague middle distance where rainbows usually have the decency to stay. Right there, close, practically at the end of the street, sitting in the field like it had popped round for a visit.

I have never, not once, been that close to the end of a rainbow.  It was one of those quietly perfect things. The sort of thing that catches you off guard and reminds you that the world can be absolutely spectacular when it puts its mind to it, even if it's been absolutely dreadful all week with the weather.

There was no pot of gold, since you ask. I had a quick look. You would have too.

Anyway. Thursday.

Thursday morning arrived grey and overcast, which is exactly how Thursday usually looks in my experience, and it wasn't raining. Sara and I had breakfast. We weren't in any particular rush because it was clearly not going to be an allotment morning — too grey, too damp-feeling in the air, the kind of morning where the allotment can wait and the kettle cannot. And then, just as we were finishing up, it began to rain.

Not a storm. No drama, no hail, no thunder announcing itself like a bloke at a party who's had too many. Just rain. Steady, quiet, serious, purposeful rain. The real stuff. The stuff that looks unremarkable from the window and absolutely doesn't get enough credit. The kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as arrive, and then simply stays, because it has places to be and things to do and a very long list of dried-out allotment plots to attend to.

I cannot tell you how much we have needed it.

The ground up at the plots has been drying out badly. Earlier in the week I'd been putting bedding plants in, and even after all those dramatic-looking storms we'd had, even after all that sound and fury — an inch down and the soil was powder dry. We've been watering, of course. Me and Sam have been back and forth with the watering cans like a pair of porters at a very unglamorous hotel. You can do your best with a watering can. You really can. But a watering can is to proper rain what a postcard is to actually being there. It wets the top, keeps things going, ticks the box. It does not get down deep where the roots are, down where the soil has baked hard and the earthworms have given up and gone somewhere else entirely.

This rain on Thursday got there. You could see it, almost, if you watched it long enough — the way it soaked in steadily rather than running off, the way the earth went from pale and tired to dark and satisfied right before your eyes. The raspberries have been struggling. I've been watching them with the quiet concern you reserve for things you can't do much about. But Thursday, I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if I'd heard them sigh. That long, slow, grateful sigh of something that has been very thirsty and has finally, properly, had a drink. Dramatic? Possibly. True? Entirely.

I did what any sensible person does when it rains properly on a Thursday morning. I went to the shed.

Not to hide from the rain, you understand. Not as a retreat. More as a viewing platform. A place of appreciation. The allotment shed on a rainy day is one of the great underrated pleasures of this life, and I will not be argued out of that. I made myself comfortable, I switched on my little radio — I won't tell you what I was listening to because it might be embarrassing, but I enjoyed it enormously — and I sat and I listened to the rain on the roof. That particular sound. If you've never sat in a shed and listened to rain on a tin roof then you are missing something genuinely wonderful. It's rhythmic, it's peaceful, it's the most honest sound in the world. It means things are happening out there that need no assistance from me whatsoever. The ground is being fed. The roots are drinking. My raspberries are sighing happily. All I have to do is sit here and listen.

There is a particular quality of contentment available only to gardeners on rainy days, and I think it comes from knowing that you've done your work, you've planted your things, and now nature is getting on with its side of the deal without being asked. Gardening is a partnership, in the end. You do your bit — the digging, the planting, the worrying, the watering, the losing battles with slugs — and then occasionally the sky opens up and does something magnificent, and you sit in your shed and feel very glad about all of it.

After a while Iris appeared at the shed door with two mugs of tea, which I thought was extraordinarily well timed and told her so. We sat together for a bit, listening. Not saying much. The rain kept on. The ground kept drinking.

The rainbow on Wednesday night, the rain on Thursday morning. Not a bad week, all things considered.

Not a bad week at all.