Rain, rain go away

[millionreasons]

Out through the arid, heat-soaked, scorched-and-cracked-earth drought driving horizontal rain* to High Wycombe where we meet Susan and get a bus up to the Hellfire Caves and ponder around the rather damp ‘n’ dark caverns, complete with really bad mannequins and inconsequential voice-over. The tone is definitely family-oriented: no mention of orgies or goat sacrificing allowed. We indulge our decadent side by having a forbidden picnic on the tables meant for the café before the staff shoo us away and we go up to the Torchwood Dashwood Mausoleum and down through mud, marsh, Flanders-style squelch and rain (note to self: don’t go walking in the rain ever ever again) until the pub finds us, somewhat bedraggled, and the sun comes out a little too late, but we ditch the other 3 miles of the walk and get the train back to High Wycombe to the rather charming Bell pub for honey-beer and Thai food and the train back to the warm city.

*I am starting to feel sympathy with the colonial colonels of yore; no wonder they were so beastly to the natives when the rains didn’t cease for weeks on end. I wonder if the East India Water Company insisted that there was a drought as well.