Right as rain

‘The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers / Pass me the bottle, old lad, there’s an end of summer.’ The paraphrase was justified, for the weather was doing its best to reinforce Housmanic gloom — although the scene through the windowpanes was best described in Scottish, not Shropshire. There is a Scots word, dreich. It may not be quite onomatopoeic, but roll it round your mouth and you will get the message. We certainly did.

Before us was a sodden lawn festooned with dead leaves. A few weeks ago, they would have been resplendent in dancing verdancy. More recently, it would have been a stately golden brown, the colour of mature Rieussec. They now looked like corpses on a muddy Flanders battlefield, so crushed that it was hard to believe they had ever been alive. This was as dreich as a wet Sunday in Arbroath.