I am lying in bed listening to the rain. I love this feeling! Why do I shiver involuntarily when it drums on my window? As if the mere thought of it chills me to the bone? As if I am immersed in a freezing lake? Baptised in a welter of cool, clear drops? Yet simultaneously, I feel warm, toasty, smug? Wrapped in my duvet. Snuggled under the covers.

I love watching the rain trickling down my window. How it fractures, breaks, dislocates, then duplicates itself where it meets the glass’s minor imperfections. How the colour through these channels is dim, faded, washed out. As if it’s an echo or ghost of the colour around it. How the trickles become runnels, rivulets, streams. They meet at the bottom edge of my sash in a mini wave and sluice across my window sill.

Years of sailing in inclement weather off the Essex coast gave me a slight antipathy to being wet on water. But I’m the child that jumps in puddles. I kick my heels on a river bank, trammelling the water, then happily sitting in a halo of spray. I splash through streams on stiff-legged boots. I spend hours in a rock pool digging for buried treasure. I may not be the last one standing, but I will be the last one wading in any kind of water. History relates that I could swim before I could walk. That I would crawl to the edge of a pool, drop in and swim away. In short, I am a water baby.

I love the sensation of rain on my skin. Purifying, invigorating, cleansing, fresh. I love the feel of it. The taste of it. The smell of it. After a substantial rainfall, the scent of the earth rises, infuses and colours the air. It is intoxicating. And I only get that assault on my senses when the rain has brought the world to life, has made it fully present. I even love those stinging strokes, when the wind hurls the rain in my face like tiny daggers. It makes me feel truly alive.

I have been in Africa in a major rainstorm. It is visible like a sheet across the sky on a far horizon. It comes in from a distance. You can almost see its march. Seemingly slow at first. Then fast, fast. Gathering momentum. Suddenly, it is upon you, in a wall of noise. And it is dark, dark. Almost black. Vertical. Plentiful. And it is gratefully received. Fat raindrops that are sucked up by a hungry earth the minute they hit the ground. When you wake in the morning it is as if the world has been wiped clean. It is bright, crisp, sparkling. And I could forgive you for believing that something far, far greater than yourself, something divine, has painted a brand new, crystal clear, splendidly colour full universe…