What Rainy Days Felt Like During an 80s Childhood

Rain cancelled the day, and there was no appeal. If the plan was outside and outside was wet, everybody went home and that was the end of it.

What followed was a specific kind of trapped afternoon. Indoors, with limited options, with the weather visible through a window, waiting for it to stop and mostly it did not.

The window was the first hour

Everybody has this memory. Kneeling on the back of a sofa or standing at a window, watching rain, doing nothing else, for a genuinely unreasonable length of time.

Racing drops down the glass was the standard activity. Pick two, watch which reaches the bottom first, discover that drops merge and change speed unpredictably and that your one has been absorbed by a larger one. Repeat for twenty minutes.

Nobody suggested this. Every child in every wet country independently invented drop racing, which suggests it is somewhere close to a default human behavior when presented with a window and no alternatives.

The board games came out

Rainy days were when the games got played, and they got played to destruction.

A game that takes ninety minutes is a burden on a normal day and a gift on a wet one. Long games with complicated rules, played properly for the first time because for once there was enough afternoon.

Every household's game boxes were incomplete. Pieces had been lost years earlier and substitutions were in permanent use: a coin standing in for a token, a written note replacing a lost card, a rule everybody had agreed on because nobody could find the instructions.

Family arguments over board games in that period were real and were about the rules as often as about the outcome, because there was frequently no authoritative copy of the rules in the house.

Things got made badly

The other rainy day category was construction, using materials not intended for it.

A fort out of chairs and blankets, which required the good blankets and got dismantled before dinner. A den under a table. Something built out of cardboard boxes that had been saved for exactly this. A drawing project that consumed forty sheets of paper.

The output was consistently poor and the process was several hours long, which was the requirement being met.

Reading happened by default

A wet Sunday with nothing on television and nowhere to go is where a lot of people accidentally became readers.

Not by choice, and not because anybody encouraged it. Because the alternatives had been exhausted by two in the afternoon and there was a shelf in the room.

The books were whatever the household had. Frequently something too old for you, occasionally something completely unsuitable, and often the same one read repeatedly because the selection was small. A lot of people's formative reading was determined entirely by what happened to be on one shelf during a bad week of weather.

The sound was part of it

Rain on a window is a wide-spectrum noise with no pattern, which is why it works as a sound to be indoors with. Heavy rain on a roof, especially a thin one, produced something considerably louder and better.

The best version was a car. Sitting in a parked car in heavy rain, with the engine off, is a specific and universally recognized pleasure. Enclosed, dry, with an enormous amount of noise happening a few centimeters away.

Everybody who has sat in a car waiting for someone during a downpour has had this, and nobody has ever complained about the wait.

Going out in it anyway

Occasionally somebody decided the rain was not a reason to stay in, and this was always the correct decision.

Puddles were the whole point, specifically the deep ones, specifically jumping into them properly rather than carefully. Getting completely soaked, at which point there was nothing left to protect and everything got considerably more fun.

Coming back inside afterward was half the experience: wet clothes in a heap, a towel, something hot, and the specific comfort of being warm having been very cold ten minutes earlier. That contrast is the entire reward and it requires actually getting wet first.

Why they are remembered fondly

Nobody enjoyed a rained-off day at the time. It was a disappointment, and the boredom was real and lasted for hours.

What made them stick is that they were unlike other days. Rain removed the default programme and forced something else to happen, and the something else was frequently better and always more memorable than the outdoor afternoon it replaced.

That is the general shape of it. The days that are recalled clearly are usually the ones where the plan failed, which is a slightly inconvenient thing to know about memory and appears to be true regardless.