The real story, of course, is the rain.
Its shift from catharsis to ordeal.
The lawns remember their plushness.
The reservoirs draw their stores
and sewage pipes retch into the sea.

It rained, a queen died and it rained some more.
The rain had nothing clever to say about any of it.

Black dress, black tie, black digital mastheads.
The angloshere switched to night mode
and I switched off the anglosphere
to listen to the rain from my messy little flat.

I could feel content in breathing my last with the rain blasting the windows,
the blocked guttering funnelling it into a kind of waterfall,
not quite a full-on Roy Batty “tears in rain” death — 
just the meagre trickle of tears in a messy dark room
within an all-consuming deluge. 

All those ‘90s action flicks with heavy rain in the climactic scene. 
Van Damme impales Dolph Lundgren onto a hay harvester. 
They will meet again in a non-linear sequel. 

The reporter says that the news is beginning to “trickle through” in Windsor.
Windsor famously has no internet, radio or television. 
They enter leaky hovels and scan the trickles for epochal happenings.
The reporter could have told them but that would have breached an unspoken ethics
like rescuing a lost baby penguin.

I apologise for the harm that my previous comments may have caused.
I was speaking through the rain, because of the rain, and to the rain. 

I sometimes forget that I live on a rainy little island.
My parents hopped over from the rainy little island next door.
The history I was taught followed the trajectories of a few special raindrops 
with barely a word spoken about the storm.