Rainspotting is the ultimate anorak pastime. You really need an anorak to do it. You could use an umbrella, only then it'd be difficult to write at the same time. You could sit indoors. Most trainspotters don't have a sixth-floor window overlooking Crewe Junction, but everyone in Britain gets a corporate-box view of the weather. 'In the past few years,' Brian Cathcart writes on page two, 'I have watched a lot of rain through my big window.' As beginnings of British books about Britain go, this is unpromising. The only more daunting marker of intent would be: 'In the past few years, I have watched a lot of boiling water in my big tea mug.' A little further on, Cathcart writes: 'Overall the years since 1997 or so have been wet in a way I do not remember experiencing before.' I had the fleeting sense that I was sitting on a park bench, wearing a flat cap and a raincoat buttoned up to the neck, listening to Peter Cook.

LRB 22 May 2003 | PDF Download