A Foul-Weather Friend: Reading Alice Thomas Ellis in the Rain

The “fair-weather friend” gets a bad rap; flighty, prone to ditching when the going gets tough. On the other hand, rare is the gem of a friend who can accompany one in difficulty, offering hope and encouragement while understanding your woes. What you’re more likely to encounter when the fair-weather friends migrate to milder climes are morose friends.

Which you do rather need. The cheerful and sunny cannot understand the death-by-a-thousand-papercuts reality of the daily drudgeries of life. Which most often shows itself when the sun is blotted out by thick cloud cover or sleep is elusive.

There are some people eager for others’ sufferings, not in a sadistic way but simply out of comfortable familiarity. The foul-weather friend may be a person so morose and used to suffering that the people you turn to on dark days may pull you down into deepest blackness. What you need when the sun has not shone its rejuvenating rays in many a dreary day is a friend who is perfectly miserable but also funny.

Enter: Alice Thomas Ellis. Her years-long column “Home Life,” which ran in the late 1980s in the Spectator, is a blues-infused journey through the year, beginning with the hols in January (the children’s holiday from school, apparently. Love the Britishism…not that we understand them) and going right through to dreading Christmas every week leading up to it in December. One has to wonder if the reason so many massively depressed writers were depressed almost solely for lack of sunshine.

Ellis’s descriptions of the alternately freezing and flooding Welsh countryside is a study in atmospheric misery. On a drive through the countryside, she observes “the animals seemed even more suicidal than usual.” There follow such dismal descriptions of squirrels casting themselves under car tires and depressed cows. Yet, somehow, the passages of brooding, bad-weather, dark-humor suicidality come across as funny rather than tragic.

Reading Ellis, one sometimes realizes how at home in herself the woman was. There is never time spent on the page worrying about how she ought to be or what could be the case. It’s all matter-of-fact: this is the way things are. Perhaps that’s one secret to surviving a down mood: not thinking that anything should be otherwise. Why shouldn’t there be horrid days in which one’s perception narrows to a brooding tunnel of pessimistic myopia? The moment one thinks that suffering is in itself something amiss is the moment self-pity enters in, which is a terrible thing, indeed.

Back to the fundamental issue: a lack of sun. Days of rain and the deep chill in the bones that comes from a cold, humid environment is enough to drive the sensitive to the edge of sanity. Wallowing—with a sense of humor about it, mind—has its place. All the same, it’s probably best to finish up the current volume of “Home Life” sitting in the first rays of sun bursting out after stormy days. Dermatologists’ dire warnings aside, without that balm to body and soul of the life-giving sun, we’d be as depressed as the dark-humored Brits.

As Ma Ingalls was known to remark: “It takes all kinds of people to make a world.” Fair-weather friends have their place, just like foul-weather friends. Though, choose carefully.