Recently, it has been raining rather a lot in England, and we’ve had terrible flooding as a result. The skies are dark, the ground is soggy and I find myself housebound, reluctant to venture out beneath clouds that leave me damp and shivering. The cold I don’t mind; but having grown up in Alexandria, where the climate is arid and rain is a rarity, I find it difficult to embrace the rain that’s so common in England.

When I write romance stories, I naturally think of settings that are light and warm. It is little wonder, then, that I set my debut novel Burning Embers in Kenya. But can rain create a romantic mood just as well? I wondered. I decided to ponder the question, and when I did, I realised that my most lasting impression of bad weather in stories had been of the Shakespearean King Lear, grief-stricken and quite mad, raging at the elements:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout   

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! 

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,     

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,    

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,    

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!          

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once               

That make ingrateful man!        

Rain, for me, was very much a negative, compounded by language like ‘drenching’ and ‘drowning’. But then I cast my mind back to books I’ve read and films I’ve seen, and I realised that there’s a second manifestation of rain – as a rather romantic, even sensual catalyst for the connection of two lovers. For example, there are some wonderful examples of climactic kissing scenes in movies between rain-drenched characters; take the last scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the seminal scene from The Notebook (if rainy kisses make you melt, take a look at http://www.ranker.com/list/the-20-most-romantic-kisses-in-the-rain-in-movie-history/brian-walton where you can watch 20 scenes from movies). And the successful romance saga Twilight is set in ‘the wettest place in the continental US’.

So what is it about rain that can create the atmosphere for romance? I think perhaps it is the stripping down of barriers: your hair, carefully styled; your makeup, carefully applied; your clothes, carefully chosen – all are ruined, insignificant, and only a raw essence of the self remains. You’re wilder, more attuned with nature, carefree – you’re wet, you realise, and then you figure there’s nothing more to lose; bring it on. Such an attitude is of course conducive to passion. And what’s not to like in a partner who’s similarly dishevelled? As the soaked Colin Firth demonstrated in the BBC adaption of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a man with clothes sticking to him is a sight to behold…