Musings on Japan #4: Hallelujah, it’s raining rain!

I live in Adelaide, which, despite what everyone says, is actually quite a nice place, and has a few claims to fame.

Some are good - such as our plonk, Coopers Stout, great pubs (Grace Emily to name just one), and … some other stuff that may or may not involve alcohol.

Some are negative, such as the Snowtown massacre, and West End beer.

The latter involves miserable, chemically fluids … actually, so did the former.

West End claims their beer is perfect for South Australia because it quenches the thirst of the "driest state on the driest continent". The quenching bit would not hold up in a court of law (afterall, beer is a diuretic. And West End beer is poop). However, the dry bit is unfortunately very accurate, as SA has suffered a drought for quite some time.

That is, until yesterday, when the heavens opened up on us like a drunken footy team relieving themselves on a bus stop.

The aforementioned deluge leads me to a convoluted, yet seamless segueway ... the next installment of my Musings on Japan.

When I lived in Koshigaya, Saitama, there was something that was optimistically categorized as a river nearby. It was, instead, numerous brown viscous puddles, connected by sluggish tributaries of slime.

That was until the wet season, which, I was reliably informed by everybody, would last from the beginning of June till the first week of July. Because that was what their calendars said. Well there must have been a misprint, because instead of the promised 5 weeks of torrential rain, we got, at a stretch, a few days.

But these few days were enough to transform our boggy, stinking riverbed into a raging, stinking river.

While looking from a bridge at this fast-flowing, brown soup, I remember seeing, honestly, at first, a dead carp bobbing along, all-glassy eyed and fetid. Following that was a dead cat, bloated like a fugu. Then there was a dead dog with its mouth gaping wide, seemingly in mid-bark. I waited to see if the old lady from the fable, who coughed up these delicacies, would follow.

She didn’t. Which is unfortunate because it would have finished this story off nicely.