The first drop of rain and out they come, getting in your way and threatening your eyes. We need a law to control the nasty, pointy, dangerous things
U
mbrellas, I don’t like them. Don’t get on with them, never have. When my aunt in Zagreb was absorbed in some crime drama on the television, she would say it was “as tense as an umbrella”. The English translation doesn’t work, but if I may turn it around, I would like to explain why umbrellas make me tense.
There are so many reasons. If I need an umbrella, I rarely have one. If I do have one, I then leave it somewhere. If it’s windy, that humiliating inside-out thing might happen. All in all, it is very much not worth the bother. My hairdo isn’t changed by rain anyway. Yet so many people don’t seem to leave home without an umbrella, and they are only one raindrop away from calling on it. I marvel at this level of organisation, even envy it, but there should be a law against putting up a brolly if significant rain isn’t coming down.
Late for a hospital appointment last week, I was hurrying along a city street when I felt the merest sprinkle of rain tickle my cheek. In an instant, the umbrella ultras sprang into action. It was as if this was the moment for which they had been waiting, yearning. Their internal rainometers, being set to ultrasensitive, were triggered. And with astonishing speed and economy of movement, umbrellas were retrieved and unfurled. Their reaction times were something to behold. They were like sprinters hearing the B in bang, or Clint Eastwood in one of those spaghetti westerns – so quick on the draw that the journey of the brolly from handbag to hand to unfurling is barely observable to the naked eye. “Unfurl” isn’t quite the right word, implying as it does a more leisurely movement. This is more like a snapping open, as violent as the snapping shut of a Venus flytrap.
