Rain & Shine

It used to rain inside my old house on Darley Street. A downpour outside meant a steady drizzle in the hall. You had to wear shoes when walking to the toilet on rainy nights or suffer the wet-footed consequences.

Yesterday I visited another rainy house. This one is actually an art installation, part of the Art and About festival that’s on at the moment. The raining house is entitled ‘I wish you hadn’t asked’ and is supposed to be about relationships – you say or do something you can’t take back, then rot sets in and everything is slowly destroyed.

I’m not in the practice of destroying relationships myself, so that wasn’t my interpretation. I found that it spoke to my morbid fascination with urban decay. Here was a house – a home – with dishes in the sink, pictures on the walls, and books on the shelves, seemingly abandoned; its people perhaps lost to some unimaginable horror, a horror just as inconceivable, just as tragic, as rain inside a house.

Outside, the sun was shining and people in bright yellow raincoats trooped barefoot up the front steps.