The weather was a bit sneaky in the past week, with the sailors involved in the grand parade of the International Fleet Review having to slosh their way through Pattaya floodwater on Beach Road after an untimely storm.
To their credit, they tried to ignore the waters lapping over their ankles and bravely kept on marching, although of course as matelots they ought to be able to handle a bit of water even if it is on the murky side.
It was rather sad to see their immaculate white uniforms suffer such indignities -- not quite what the organisers had in mind. If it's any consolation to the seafarers, there's a lot worse things that can happen to you in Pattaya than getting your feet wet. No doubt some of the sailors discovered this first hand later in the week while taking in the cultural delights of Walking Street.
Unusual weather around the globe seems to be dominating the news with increasing frequency. It's almost as if Mother Nature is getting her own back on us for truly messing up the world.
Marching orders
The only marching I ever experienced was as a teenager in the Boys' Brigade, attached to the Methodist Church. The motto was "Sure and Steadfast", although I was anything but that.
We had a uniform that included a ghastly pillbox hat that I hated wearing in public. The day I dreaded most was the monthly march through town on a Sunday morning, praying that none of my schoolmates would see me and my wretched pillbox.
But there was always someone who spotted me and would gleefully relate to the entire class about Crutch and his silly hat. Our squad also took part in sporadic marching competitions and usually came last. The only thing we perfected was the art of marching completely out of step -- we even made "Dad's Army" look good.
I am thankful that we never had to march through flooded streets, but being in England we did regularly experience precipitation of all types and it was not unknown to end up sitting in church soaking wet and disrupting the sermon with loud sneezing.
See which way the wind blows
Talking about inclement weather, while reading a novel the other day I came across "sou'wester", which I hadn't seen or heard for many years. A contraction of southwesterly, in the context of the book it referred to a southwesterly wind, although it can also mean a fisherman's oilskin hat.
The word reminded me of my Uncle Arthur, whom I regularly visited as a kid at his Hampshire home. A former merchant seaman, he regarded himself as an authority on the weather and his favourite expression was "there's a sou'wester brewing", meaning we were in for heavy rain. He was on a pretty safe bet with his forecasts because the prevailing winds came from the southwest and invariably brought lashings of the wet stuff.
More interesting were his tales of miraculously surviving U-boat attacks while doing the Atlantic crossing in World War II, during which nearly 2,500 British merchant vessels were sunk.
Raining buckets
When I was a nipper, one winter a well-meaning neighbour bought me a sou'wester hat, which to a six-year-old felt more like a punishment than a gift. At the very hint of rain I was expected to wear it. Even at that age I felt a bit stupid and when also wearing Wellington boots I must have looked a bit like Paddington Bear, without the wet nose.
But as we all know, Paddington Bear became a great authority on British weather when he arrived in England armed with the knowledge that "Londoners have 107 different ways to say it's raining". I think I have experienced most of those 107 variations, but thankfully have yet to see cats and dogs falling out of the sky. The bear's favourite was "it's bucketing down".
Mrs Gamp
As a kid I would go for walks with my dad in the nearby Chiltern Hills and if rain was threatening he would say "we had better take a gamp" and would pick up an umbrella in the doorway. I had no idea why he called it a gamp and assumed it was just a nickname he had made up.
It wasn't until years later that I discovered Charles Dickens was the source of this quaint word. It came from the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit, which had a character called Sarah Gamp, a nurse who was almost always in possession of an umbrella. The word gamp proceed to enter common usage in Victorian times and my dad presumably inherited it from his parents.
Umbrellas up
On the subject of umbrellas, a few weeks ago in PostScript there was an item on how in Thailand you are more likely to see umbrellas used to keep the sun off, rather than the rain.
My thanks to a reader from England who spotted a group of spectators during one of the practice rounds at the Open golf tournament in Royal Birkdale in July. All the spectators were enjoying a rare beautiful day on the Lancashire coast, blissfully soaking up the sun, apart from one small group of women who strangely had their umbrellas up.
On closer inspection he discovered they were actually Thai ladies following golf stars Thongchai Jaidee and Pachara Khongwatmai.
Contact Postscript via email at oldcrutch@gmail.com
