My two rainy holidays were a disaster until I found the silver lining

Natasha Pszenicki

Robbie Smith, Comment and Literary editor @robbiemclsmith

11 April 2022

“It’s like rain on your holiday,” Alanis Morissette almost sang. Imagine, escaping the daily grind with two mini breaks in the space of a week, only to get utterly drenched at the very beginning of both. Reader, I don’t have to imagine.

More fool me, you might say, holidaying in Europe in March. It’s just asking for a downpour. The unexpected thing, though, was that a soaking doesn’t just get you wet — it gives you a relationship health check too.

Lisbon was first. My girlfriend and I sampled the delights of Heathrow Terminal 5’s finest (and only) Wetherspoons just before our 9am flight. What a start to the holiday. Our buzz lasted a decent while — until our very first step out of the Lisbon metro and into the teeth of an Atlantic rainstorm. Water poured off the city’s pretty roof tiles and directly onto us with the force of the Niagara Falls.

We might as well have been walking along the bottom of the sea. We were soaked in minutes. What a start to the holiday, indeed.

At this point things tend to go one of two ways. Either you burst into a flaming row: “Whose idea was it to take the ‘scenic route’ in a thunderstorm?” Or you both enjoy the soothing qualities of a bottle of vinho verde and laugh about it — and the fact that I brought only a single pair of trousers and had to squelch out to dinner.

Whichever course, something changes. You’re either on firmer or rockier ground together than you were before the rain. Those dreadful 10 minutes may have left me with the indignity of having to dry my jeans by wearing them, but they brought us closer together.

Cut to Salisbury, a few days later, and the start of a three-day cycling extravaganza with a good friend. The forecast read sun every day. After a few hours on the road, the heavens opened. Cue a six-hour slog in the kind of rain that soaks you in seconds and makes a mockery of the very concept of a “waterproof”.

Pushing our bikes over a muddy cycle path in rain so dense we could barely see, we burst into delirious laughter. Pursued in north Swindon by an expressionless, bald man in his forties who walked straight through puddles in smart-looking boots like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, and who started speeding up the nearer he got to us we laughed again (and ran away fast).

Cold and tired we greedily drank the best coffee of our lives, dispensed from a Costa Coffee machine in a Co-op in a car park. At the end of the day, as we reposed among our steaming clothes laid out to dry in the hotel room, and I upbraided myself for bringing only a single pair of shoes (bit of a theme), we shivered, started to warm up and didn’t talk about giving up.

As this Monday draws to a close and you dream of holidays to come this summer, let me be the first to say: aim for sun. Unless you’re ready for a true test of companionship.

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My two rainy holidays were a disaster until I found the silver lining

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