It's not so much raining as teeming, pouring, lashing, pelting down. The burn is foaming yellow with earth brought down from landslips overnight. The bridge is flooded and so is part of the view from the windows. What isn't flooded, is mudded.

When I made the ten second dash across the yard to open the stable door and invite the horse out this morning, the horse just looked at me as if I'd asked him to unicycle to John O' Groats with a lobster on his head. "Uh-uh, no, thanks for the offer. But you could just bring me some hay and top up the water, oh and while you're there, can I have a few carrots in that bucket? Much obliged. See you at elevenses."

I know exactly where the expression "raining cats and dogs" comes from. It is raining cats and dogs, not outside, but inside. The cat is bored. The dog is bored. In the cat's case, this manifests itself by a sort of wall of death scenario, in which he attempts to bounce off every surface in the room, including me, the dog, the ceiling, this laptop and the stove (in which where is a log fire burning). Periodically he slams out through the catflap, only to slam angrily back in again, soaking wet, a few seconds later. In the dog's case, boredom is overcome by galloping after the cat, barking manically: "Look, look, see how really naughty the cat is being!" Occasionally, for variety, the dog dashes past me pursued by the cat, who gives him a right and then a left hook when he catches up. Paff! Paff! A gong for the inventor of the Kong, say I. Stuffed with cheese and Schmackos, the rubber Kong is the perfect doggie dummy. Other dog placation tools are available. The cat can be placated by permitting him to go and stretch out on the bed, where he lies with a smug, purring, "gotcha" look on his face. Sometimes I forget to shut the bedroom door and find the cat and the dog in there, cosily snuggled up together. They couldn't possibly be in cahoots - could they? Naaaa...

It's not just the weather. It's the knowledge that it can go on for weeks, months and, on more than one "I can't stand it one more day, I'm going mental with cabin fever" occasion, years. So you really want to work from home, huh? In a little house in the country where you can sit and watch the rain falling? Really? Really?

What sort of tasty brew can I make from a lip-puckering shrivelled up old lemon of a day like this? Other than reminding myself that I have a roof over my head, friends and relatives, bread currently baking in the oven, all the clean water I can drink or, at this rate, drown in (hah!), and my country isn't being invaded, of course. I'm not being sarcastic, those are genuinely things to be grateful about and I am grateful.

My thoughts turn to all those literary references to rain, from Shakespeare's "Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes spout till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" and "hey, ho, the wind and the rain...for the rain it raineth every day" to Kipling's "weather and rain have undone it again" to Lord Bowen's "The rain it raineth on the just and also on the unjust fella: but chiefly on the just, because the unjust steals the just's umbrella".

Then there is the creepy song about the dreadful wind and rain. This is a genuine earworm of a song. It rises and falls in your mind like the winter wind eerily moaning under a door and once there, it just won't go away until it has whispered all its awful secrets to you. This is part of one version, as sung by Gillian Welch, of a very, very old song with many variants:

"There were two sisters of County Clare, oh, the wind and rain; one was dark and the other was fair, oh, the dreadful wind and rain. And they both had a love of the miller's son, oh, the wind and rain; but he was fond of the fairer one, oh, the dreadful wind and rain. So she pushed her into the river to drown, oh, the wind and rain; and watched her as she floated down, oh, the dreadful wind and rain..."

The corpse floats on the water until eventually its bones are found by a passing fiddler, who: "made a fiddle peg of her long finger bone; oh, the wind and the rain; he made a fiddle peg of her long finger bone, crying oh, the dreadful wind and rain. And he strung his fiddle bow with her long yeller hair, oh, the wind and the rain; he strung his fiddle bow with her long yeller hair, crying oh, the dreadful wind and rain. And he made a fiddle of her breast bone, oh, the wind and rain; he made a fiddle of her breast bone, crying oh, the dreadful wind and rain..."

Brrrrr. If that doesn't freeze the blood, I don't know what does. Rain and wind is not all doom and gloom of course. There is the genius of "Anon" who wrote, sometime before the start of the sixteenth century, "Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow, The small raine down can raine. Cryst, if my love were in my armes, And I in my bedde again!" "My bedde" is just exactly where I would go to escape the "dreadful wind and rain" today; but it seems to be full of cat and dog. Things to be grateful for - the horse has not made it into the house - yet. Hmmmm....