Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Krause thinks England has too little weather
When Sarah Krause worked for the Financial News in London, England, she discovered, as had hundreds of talented writers before her, that English weather is a palpable presence in everyday life, like double decker buses and Yorkshire pudding. If you don't learn to deal with it, you go mad.
When she first arrived in London her editor immediately handed her an umbrella and a stout pair of yellow galoshes.
"You'll need these, lass, afore the lashin' o' the rain!" he told her in a thick Scottish burr.
On her very first assignment, covering the collapse of the bashed neeps market in Brown Willy, Cornwall, it rained for five days straight, and then fog set in that was so thick she couldn't see the forest for the trees -- or something like that.
When it wasn't raining the very ground oozed a sullen damp that got into her socks, her car, her apartment -- even her cherished antique hugger mugger on the fireplace mantel; it grew so moldy that she finally donated it to the National Penicillin League.
And when the sun actually made an appearance it merely highlighted the centuries of soot and Marmite that covered every brick, street light, fountain, and statue in London and the surrounding suburbs. She also discovered that English people see the sun so rarely that it frightens them, and they refer to it as 'the big yellow monster in the sky that wants to kill us with heat rays.'
It never snowed; the Worshipful Guild of Costermongers spread white confetti on the ground every Christmas Eve, and that was it.
Krouse soldiered bravely on for three years under these appalling meteorological conditions before succumbing to dish pan fever and being evacuated back to America by the Royal Navy on the battleship HMS Otiose.
She now writes about the shenanigans of the telecommunication industry for the Wall Street Journal, winning the coveted J. Fred Muggs Award for her coverage of Ted Danson's liver spots.
She makes her home in the back of the former Buster Keaton Land Yacht:
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