“When in April, with its sweet showers”

Writing exercise based on a 14^th-century poet’s work.

“When in April, with its sweet showers”

-Chaucer

When in April, with its sweet showers, sales of Gore-Tex fabric go through the roof. Especially in cloud-laden Manchester. You won’t go wrong with a Sprayway or Berghaus. You can’t get out as often as you might like, but if you are stuck in the house, rain is the perfect opportunity to knuckle down and write. Silence, when writing, can be a strange contradictory distraction, the sound of the computer keys and the endless sigh of the computer fan mocking you. Bu the tinny drum of rain on your window can spur on a thousand thoughts and inspire countless sentences. Who wants to go out in that anyway?

And so, a tale forms in the writer’s mind of a man trapped in his compact apartment, living out his adventures in his mind and on the page. He turns the background on his Word document to gold, to blur the contrast, and lives his life through fiction- void of restraint. In this world, it’s tropical, his skin sun-resistant, his world no longer a row of identikit houses but a network of caves opening onto a beach with a clear sea, where creatures lie like boats, ready to link him to other islands.