May 21 - Day 59 - 'Love is heavy and light' William Shakespeare. 'Rain is light and heavy', Ruth

I looked at the weather forecast this morning, despite my view out of the window telling me everything I needed to know! ‘Light rain showers and a fresh breeze’ were the exact words used to describe home and work.

I was one minute away from home and already the rain was dripping from my helmet and the wind was battering me in the face. Luckily, I had put my waterproofs on but there was no way this morning I was going to stop for photographs, relying instead on the small camera mounted on my handlebars (which as you can see from the picture at least gives a sense of what it was like).

There were so many times I muttered under my breath, ‘light rain?’ on the way here, that when I got here and started drying out, I felt I needed to know how they decide what to define rain as.

From the Met office, I discovered that ‘Light rain is defined as less than half a mm per hour. Moderate rain is 0.5mm to 4mm, and heavy rain is greater than 4mm per hour.’ Now that doesn’t really mean a lot to me (or at least didn’t when cycling through the puddles) so to help everyone out, I’ve decided that there should be a new definition.

Light rain is when it takes half an hour to dry my socks and trainers on the radiator here, Moderate is when it takes between 2 and 4 hours and heavy rain is when I need to find a different pair of socks to wear all day and hope that by the time I go home my trainers are no longer squelching. Given that I am sat typing this in a new pair of socks and even though I have been here nearly four hours, my trainers (still on the radiator) have only just started to look better - I leave you with the conclusion that - light rain it was not!

I hope you have a good weekend and thanks as always for all the support and donations. I did say it had to be a challenge but it is definitely for a very worthwhile cause.