it's a washout

The next lot of rain is coming*.  We've been watching on the rain radar through the day as the big, solid mass of it moved across the UK, due here this evening.  The Systems Administrator told me this morning that I should have at least until six to garden, and the Met Office forecast put its arrival sometime between seven and ten this evening.  I spent the day working on the sloping bed in the back garden, trimming the edges and pulling weeds out of the boggy area, which keeps expanding to take in an ever increasing number of plants.  I tried not to think about the rain, and concentrate on the present moment, but the impending deluge lurked oppressively at the edges of my mind.

Part of the trouble is the Tendring Show, due this Saturday.  It is normally a lovely show and I always enjoy it.  I was planning to give it a miss this year when I found it fell on a working weekend, but then once I volunteered as the Treasurer of the local beekeepers I thought I ought to help on the stand, and booked the day off work specially.  Now I am afraid that the whole thing is going to be a dismal wet mess, and that we will all end up getting stuck in the car park, which is a hay field for the rest of the year, and was already pretty soft even before the latest bouts of rain from what I heard.  We are due at the show ground tomorrow at eleven to help put the display up and I expect that will be a damp and chilly process.

The Systems Administrator has kindly agreed that if the Show goes ahead and the ground looks too wet, I can have a lift there so that I don't have to take my car on to the site on Saturday, and we'll arrange a place for the SA to pick me up at the end of the day.  Traffic around the area tends to be busy on Show days, and the police are brisk about moving it on, so this can't be anywhere very close to the ground.  Probably about a mile away.  Looking at the Met Office forecast it should be raining again by then.

The SA didn't let the chickens out tonight, for fear that the rain would start before they thought it was time to go back in the chicken house (it did).  The last time that happened, the chickens all went and sheltered under the truck, which makes quite a large dry place for them to stand, while the SA had to sit in the porch waiting for them to come out from there and go to bed.

I know that the English are famous for our fixation on the weather, but I can feel myself becoming gently insane on the subject.  Though when I grumbled that at this rate it was going to rain on our garden visiting holiday in September I got rather short shrift from the SA, who has got tickets for several days of cricket in August.  It can't rain forever.  Can it?

*It arrived.