THE WATER CYCLE

Well it did rain today. Noisy, sweepy, bouncy rain that washed out the park and thundered on the windows.

I was thinking about how rain was here before us. Millions of years ago it rained in exactly the same way: on leaves and plants, dripping musically from branches under grey skies, pouring and pounding into the mud and the ocean, the grass and the rivers.

We’re lucky to be blessed with water. On other planets it rains liquid methane. Titan, a moon of Saturn, has rocks and mountains, and rivers of CH4 that flow under gassy orange skies. Meanwhile, Venus features rain made out of sulphuric acid (which you’ve got to admit would be unpleasant), and on Neptune and Uranus, the carbon ice crystallises into diamond rain.

Anyway it really did chuck it down today. I wasn’t out in it, thankfully. I was watching inside, grateful for its familiarity and its music.

You may of course, believe that rain followed Noah. The theory goes that antediluvian Earth was a sort of humid hothouse where huge animals and plants grew, and men lived to be hundreds of years old. Above the sky, like a sort of refractive greenhouse-roof was the layer of water that would eventually come crashing and cooling down onto a world of sinful people. As Noah shut the door on the ark, the first rain fell, and the world has never quite been the same since.

All I know is that it’s been raining on and off for a very long time. And probably, all this water has been recycled so many times that what comes out of our taps was once passing through the likes of Henry VIII, John the Baptist, the Blue Whale, and the Brachiosaur.

It won’t corrode my umbrella, or pound through my raincoat like chunks of diamond. It won’t smell like flatulence (as it might on Titan) and it won’t precede an apocalyptic flood that wipes out everyone except an elderly zookeeper. It’ll just trickle and tumble like it always does, rolling and rumbling and durbling and dripping its way back to the sea - growing plants along the way, feeding animals, filling reservoirs and keeping us all very much alive and hopeful on this dusty old rock.

When it was over, I looked up above the shimmering roof tiles opposite my study window. There, as clear as one has ever been, was a gigantic rainbow, arching majestically, hopefully, brilliantly, between the clouds.

There it is, I thought. My favourite bit of the water cycle, however long this whole thing’s been going on.