Rain like Mother used to make

Back in the day, (before "back in the day" was such a widely used buzz phrase) I used to dabble in poetry. I rediscovered this the other day. It sums up both my love of rain and the relentless battle we all have with imagining things were somehow automatically better in the olden days, (which they were).

Rain
Old school rain
Old school yard rain
The rain of our childhoods
Rain like Mother used to make
Big satisfying drops crashing down on decent sized puddles
Circles ever increasing for a proper length of time
Rain like it used to be
Before they modernised it
Computerised
Digitalised it
Standardised it
Bastardised it
And put it onto the world wide webbing
As diluted, watered down, dumbed down rain

Proper rain
Rain you could scrub your roof with
Rain that could slake the thirst of a parched river
When a deluge was a proper deluge not a trickle
Not the cheap ten-a-penny lo-budget rain of nowadays
Bought with loose change in Poundworld
Rubbishy tinpot rain that has the cheek to call itself a weather feature
But proper chunky thick-cut freshly oven baked rain
Exact measures of H and O mixed in perfect proportion
Rain that could shatter the umbrella’s fragile defences

Whatever happened to the rain of the Sixties
Did it take too many drugs?
Is that why we now have acid rain?
I am sure it rained properly when I was a nipper
Before Thatcher privatised it
De-sensitised it
Scientists overanalysed it
Re-sanitised it
The church de-Satanised it
While the East de-Christianised it

It doesn’t pour like it used to
On the lush verdant fields that are always greener on the other side
We’re left with a piss poor piss down for the new Millennium
It doesn’t rain cats and dogs anymore
Since the animal rights people complained
It doesn’t crash down on England
Like it always used to
In the days before hosepipe bans

I want rain you can leave unlocked so your neighbours can stop by and use it
The rain of whimsical, wistful reminiscence
Rain that falls endlessly for days
Obscures the view held by windows
And cascades down these misted-up rose tinted glasses