Sloppy Hems, Frizz and Babies in Plastic

Well, up until now we have been pretty lucky with the weather, but here comes the rain!

I'm now beginning to understand why people walk around with giant umbrellas even when the sky is perfectly clear and blue. You just never can tell with London weather! After living in Boston for so long where the wind blows unsuspecting umbrellas inside out at the drop of a hat or catches under the thing and pulls you down the street in real live Mary Poppins style and the rain blows in sideways and soaks you anyway, I decided that umbrellas were useless marketing ploys and a waste of petroleum products and refused to purchase one for quite sometime.

Well, it seems that the rain of London is of a different ilk. This rain is of a much more proper nature. I wouldn't expect anything less from London. It generally falls straight down, as rain is meant to do, and the wind hardly bothers to blow at all. If the wind does blow, it is a rather calm and collected sort of wind. Still, due to my current prejudice against a certain rain-shielding device, I have been wandering the streets of London sans-umbrella stepping in neatly collected puddles (though sometimes the puddles are more like small lakes) and receiving wet sloppy pant hems in return. I suppose the puddles can't be avoided and said device wouldn't help such matters, but at least it might solve my frizzy hair problem.

Even the babies in strollers have umbrellas of sorts in this city. There are these funky little plastic bags (they sort of look like the long term storage bags that you pack all of your winter clothes in before putting them in the attic and forgetting about them for eons) that Londoners put over their babies' strollers. It's quite an odd site - a baby in a plastic bag! Bubble babies?

Anyway, it seems perhaps the smart thing to do would be to purchase an umbrella.