"Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me"

This, the opening couplet from Edward Thomas's Rain are apt enough today in the Blue Mountains. I am not alone - Tom is tapping at his keyboard and shouting inane remarks into his headphones - but the rain is now falling steadily and a heavy grey cloud looms over everything. Magpies in the back yard are soaked through but still, in spite of what looks a forlorn sogginess, are vigilant for whatever tiny insect moves on the lawn. It doesn't strike me as a good day to be a bee or a fly or something even smaller, but the magpie thinks otherwise. Yesterday the Japanese Maple and Wonga Wonga vine were carpeted in a constant hum of bee song, but today a great and sensible retreat is in full swing.

I am sorry for the workman next door who has come to replace part of a fence. Like the magpies, he is sodden but also industriously digging into the now soft earth. Some people have no choice how they make their money, come rain or shine they have to labour. I think we forget how difficult and physical most work used to be, cosseted as we are in offices and climate-controlled cars. Something tactile and direct has been lost.

The Thomas poem I began with does not get any brighter. The poet contemplates his comrades and friends on the battlefields of France in WW1,

"But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain"

and so the poem becomes a lament for might be or is yet to come. Thomas himself was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, so there is an element of the prophetic at work, at least for those who are left behind.