Plum rain, and the slow rhythm of the city

There is a particular kind of rain that does not come to an ending. It arrives one day in mid-June and stays, not pouring but settling, a fine horizontal drizzle that hangs in the air and leaves everything faintly damp. The umbrella that made sense for an afternoon shower becomes, for the next fortnight, an object that never quite dries. The locals call it the plum rain, the season when the fruit ripens on the trees and the sky forgets to clear.

The city adapts slowly, the way it always does, without being asked. The morning rush hour loosens. People walk a little slower because walking fast in this rain only means arriving wetter, and there is nowhere worth rushing to. The bicycle riders put on thin transparent capes that rattle in the wind. The breakfast stalls along the lane set up plastic sheeting on frames, and the steam from the cauldrons mixes with the mist so that for a few metres you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.

The interior life of the city changes with the weather. Clothes dry on no schedule, and the flat smells, faintly, of damp laundry and of the tea that is now drunk all day rather than just in the evenings. The mould on the corner of the bathroom wall appears as it does every year, and is wiped away as it does every year, and comes back. One accepts these small invasions the way one accepts the shorter days of winter: not happily, but without argument.

What the plum rain does, more than anything, is slow the city down. The weather for a month has been building toward summer, and the pace of life has been building with it, the commutes tighter, the deadlines closer, the sense of a year halfway through and half gone. Then the rain arrives and imposes its own timetable. You cannot hurry a damp pavement. You cannot outrun a drizzle that is everywhere at once. So the city stops, by degrees, and the people in it stop with it, whether they meant to or not.

There is a particular kind of walk that belongs to these weeks. You take an umbrella that is not quite large enough, and you walk without a destination, because the rain makes destination-walking pointless anyway. You watch the light on the wet road, the way the neon of the shopfronts doubles in the puddles. You notice, for the first time in months, that the plane trees on the lane have new leaves, pale and tender, because the rain has brought them out and the damp has kept them clean.

Nobody pretends the plum rain is pleasant. It is inconvenient, it is clammy, it is the reason the shoes never dry. But it is also a kind of permission. The weather gives the city an excuse to move more gently for a fortnight, and the city, after a spring of rushing, takes it. When the rain finally breaks and the sun comes out, the heat returns with a vengeance, and one looks back on those grey, wet days as a kind of held breath, exhaled at last.