A RAINY CHRISTMAS IN FRANCE

Weather in California, Australia and France.

It’s raining here in south-west France, where we are spending the holidays. It’s been raining most of the week; not downpours, just steady, soaking rain from slate-grey skies.

Not that I’m complaining. In my native Australia, rain was mostly torrential, monsoonal; like standing under a lukewarm shower. You could believe those stories, of men going mad from it; chickens staring up into it, and drowning

One of the finest poems I know about rain is the Karl Shapiro's California Winter.

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,

Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

Shapiro, who was a Californian, spent part of World War II in Melbourne, Australia. How he must have hated the weather.

I first learned of this poem from Joan Didion's essay Holy Water, a paean to weather and the Californian landscape, and still one of the most acute attempts by any writer to re-capture that awe in the face of nature which we have almost entirely lost. Such was Didion's reverence for water that she wrote of the California State Water Project Operations Control Center near Sacramento in terms one might apply to a cathedral.

I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big board with the lighted checkpoints. The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes behind me. The Delta tidal report was coming in on another. The earthquake board, which has been desensitized to sound its alarm - a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the north - only for those earthquakes which register at least 3.0 on the Richter Scale, was silent. I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day. I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still.

I know of no French writing as great as this on the topic of weather, but that may be because I haven't yet found it. French music, on the other hand, is drenched in evocations of the elements, in particular water: Debussy's La Mer (and that of Charles Trenet, come to that), Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Une Barque sur l’ocean from his suite Miroirs .

To use one of the Parisian's favourite terms, weather and the city are integral : aspects of the same thing, and not to be studied in isolation. Rain + a Paris street and Sun + a Paris street have nothing in common. Each can be described in its own particular phraseology, appreciated for its uniqueness. Capturing these distinctions in words is a particularly French skill. They speak, for instance, of that moment when dusk shades almost imperceptibly into night as entre chien et loup; between dog and wolf. Has someone confected an epigram to describe a Paris street in the rain? A question for further enquiry.