it's raining, it's pouring

Hello, it's Sunday night and we haven't been swimming all weekend. Why not? Because it looks, spookily enough, as if the Monsoon is finally upon us (of course, Hubby can say 'the monsoon has started', using the present perfect, in his tip top Nepali, because he is a big fat swot. I can't, because I would rather spend my evenings reading short stories and quaffing white wine).

I say spookily because it is yet another incidence of religious superstitious nonsense being proved right. Remember I told you about Rato Machindranath, the red goddess, who brings rain, and how her chariot was currently in procession around Patan, where we live? (She stopped for a bit because her chariot broke and that's when we had the whole constitutional crisis thing). Anyway, she finally finished her slow and halting procession through Patan on Friday, finishing up near Jawalakhel roundabout (near the zoo). Her chariot is like a huge wooden farm cart, with a little hut on top containing her, and on top of that is a huge Christmas tree-like structure, topped with flags, about fifty feet tall (which has, in the course of her procession, chopped off electricity and telecom wires for half the district - luckily not us). We drove past her chariot on the way to school on Friday and I asked surly Vasu our (soon to be ex) driver whether the Monsoon would now begin, and he assured me that it would. Then on Saturday it did start to rain, not a huge downpour, but persistently throughout the day (enough to make it feel almost like Northern Ireland, but cheerier). All of Saturday the streets were jam-packed with people and traffic. It felt like there was a festival starting. Honestly you would have thought Coldplay were headlining (or some other much cooler band - you have to remember that I'm nearly forty and therefore utterly out of touch; I watched 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks' the other night and the only person I recognised on it was Phil Jupitus, so I hardly have my finger on the musical pulse. My excuse is that whenever we put any music on at home the Twins insist on it either being Barbie Girl or something by Tchaikovsky, so that they can do their really-graceful-and-almost-exactly-like-Darcy-thungumy 'ballet dancing') except that I don't think many Coldplay fans wear saris and carry brass bowls containing rice and flower petals for their puja.

Then at about five thirty some pundits did their religious hocus pocus, and lo, it's been hammering it down all day today.

Of course, like a numpty, I've lost my new raincoat (the one which Hubby cycled all the way into Thamel to buy me only a couple of months ago), which is a really stupid thing to do, just as Monsoon is about to begin.

Do you think there is a god or goddess of lost things that I can go and do puja to, in the hope of finding my lost coat (and also lost marbles, which disappeared around the same time I had kids and got varicose veins - perhaps it was some kind of swap? In the same way as people sell their souls to the devil in return for stuff, perhaps I got Son and Twins and the trade-off was giving away all my - admittedly limited - intellect?)?

Anyway, wine glass empty now, must go and refill. Take care xxx