I wasn’t in the best of moods when I left the office, and when I stepped outside to feel that close heat, that dead, still air, and looked up at the granite looking clouds, I knew I’d be bloody lucky to make it to the tube station dry. I put the headphones in, and with Garbage’s “Sex Is Not The Enemy” playing, zipped the Stupid Thing With The Pockets up, and started walking. Sure enough, before I’d gone 10 yards, I felt the first one hit. A big heavy raindrop, the sort that you can feel as it splashes against your skin.

I broke into a jog, as the pavement around me started to stain. I passed someone from the same building as me, hunched over and muttering, clearly extremely pissed off about this. I stretched my legs a bit more, picked the pace up slightly, as it got heavier. By the time I’d gone 200 yards, it was falling out of the sky in great sheets. Two coke cans danced passed me as I crossed the road, the wind whipping them, the sheer force of the gusts causing them to bounce waist-high, and slamming rain into me. I could already feel it running off my hair in rivulets.

I was at a dead run by the time I made it across the road, and someone was laughing. It wasn’t until I passed the garden with the group of kids in football shirts, all of them spinning round with outstretched arms that I realised it was me. Hammering the pavement, every footstep raising a splash, the rain pouring off me, clothes and hair plastered to me, and the thunder bouncing off the buildings, pounding down the space between me and the tube station, laughing like a maniac. I’m sure everyone I passed thought I was some kind of escaped lunatic.

Except those kids. They got it.

There are worse ways to start a weekend.