Can there be anything as mundane or mysterious as a puddle?
My dog denies it, vehemently, on both counts. For nine-tenths of our year here in England, rain is met with sour grace because we get so much of it: but Macaulay the dog revels in the pools of water which collect in the hollows of the forest paths.
Because unlike a freshwater stream or a briny beach, the puddle has possibilities for putrefaction beyond the wildest dreams of your average small terrier. It begins deep and clear, full of fresh rainwater; and as the water cycle takes its toll the water acquires a queasy viscosity, so that water boatmen and mosquitos can call it home.
We have been caught up in an enchanting warm spell. Forest puddles shrank day by day until even the most monumental mini-lake was gone, a dry dusty patch surrounded by the imprints of hopeful dog paws and deer hooves.
The dog was not impressed. The other day he was hot and bothered and his tongue hung comically from his mouth like a slice of ham. I have never seen it look so long: an anteater would have been proud of it , if it had a little less flab and a bit more muscular tension.
Today we woke to the sound of torrential rain. There was no sidestepping it: we must walk the dog or he would make our lives a misery with his random officious woofery. We breakfasted and slipped him on a lead, stepping gingerly out in the torrent.
And realised, immediately, that the puddles were back.
They were at that limpid stage; diamond clear. my son paddled through in his all-weather sandals, my daughter sported her pretty wellies, and the dog in Arcadia erat.
There is something about throwing caution to the wind and wading into a puddle. It is as English as the umbrella we brandish against the Fates.
The folklore that surrounds the puddle is apocryphal and impossible to source with any degree of accuracy. The deep puddle is a source of particular folkloric delight. The unexpected lurks there.
Dr Gloucester is the obvious port of call here. While we can date this published rhyme back to the early nineteenth century, the linguists can trace it much earlier.
Because ‘puddle’ and ‘middle’ don’t rhyme. But ‘piddle’ and ‘middle’ do.
It’s not as earthy as it might sound: ‘piddle’ was an old English name for a stream.
There’s a rogue’s tale about a mediaeval peasant who was desperate to build a house. But he had no materials. So he nipped down the road to a cobbled street, and took half of that. Job done, problem solved.
Except that the next bloke on horseback who came that way happened upon the hole, filled with rainwater. He ended up fighting for his life, and his horse’s too.
And although it seems a criminal waste of a beautiful garment, Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have put his rather nice cloak on the ground so that Queen Elizabeth I could step daintily on it and avoid the puddle underneath.
Puddles are not just ancient folklore: there’s a Longest-Serving-Puddle title which reputedly goes to a puddle in a town on the Thames called Wallingford.If you go to the corner of Fir Tree Avenue and Wantage Road, you will apparently find a puddle which has been a recurring problem since the heady days of the seventies.
We get excited about these things here. What began as a dispute over responsibility for repair between two local authorities has transformed into tradition. There is even said to be a pub crawl that starts from the sacred puddle.
It is indicative of our love-hate relationship with puddles on this rainswept isle that one of our greatest authors chose them to name a creature of great depth and integrity, and boundless pessimism.
His name was Puddleglum.
CS Lewis created him to escort a pair of children into the very bowels of Narnia to rescue a prince who had been imprisoned by an evil enchantress. He is a Marsh Wiggle: an impossibly tall, thin figure, rather too amphibious for comfort and relentlessly morose. Everything about him is damp and redolent of pond weed.
One cannot help but adore him from introductions alone: “Puddleglum’s my name,” he tells the pair, “but it doesn’t matter if you forget it.”
But he has a cast iron set of values, and he saves the day by foiling the witch by treading on her magic, perfumed fire and bringing everyone back down to earth with the smell of burnt marsh wiggle.
We are a damp nation. We obsess over puddles and have done for centuries.
And Puddleglum is another personification of our relationship with our land, which spends so much of its life partially submerged in shallow pools of water.
Kate Shrewsday 
Thank you for reminding me about the ubiquitous puddles to which I am soon likely to be reintroduced for a couple of months. Fortunately, with any luck, I will be able to negotiate them for much of the time at a decent altitude provided by four sturdy legs belonging to a beast who will be totally indifferent to them.
The novel I am awaiting the proofs of starts with a scene where puddles play a major role, as it happens!
Col, wonderful to know you will be over here soon! What a treat!
And I shall await those opening chapters with interest 🙂
First paragraph:
‘Look, here come the Porkers!’ Joe Smith yelled to his group of friends, interrupting a fascinating game of seeing who could walk furthest into a mud puddle without getting waterlogged shoes. All interest in the puddle was immediately lost
(They regain interest in, and close aquaintance with, puddles shortly thereafter.)
😀 Great opening…look forward to publication…
I once saw a car do a Dr Gloucester during a rush-hour deluge in Nairobi – it was quite alarming
Puddles can come in all sizes, can’t they, BB? I’ve been around a swollen river when the wheels on my car started to float. A bit unnerving.
Very scary, Kate. I had to cross a little bridge which often became submerged when we had a lot of rain and I used to ‘hold thumbs’ as the alternative route was quite a bit longer.
When my son was very little he used to be most concerned about puddles and he would constantly ask ‘Does it have a bottom?’ even when we drove through one…
Very wise boy, Denise 🙂 I still recall my son stepping in a puddle right up to his middle…
Mac has a sister over here in Princess, because the longer the water has been puddled, the murkier and muddier it is, the more she wants to drink it. She will drink that a lot faster and more excitedly than from her big bowl of fresh water inside the house!. She also loves to lick the rain water off the floor of the pergola, and would quite literally spend an hour out there licking up every drop! I don’t know what the deal is. I had always thought it had to do with her being abandoned at a young age, and having to fend for herself for a few weeks out in the wild. Hearing about Mac has made me reconsider that.
Maybe it’s just that dogs are weird, and can sometimes have foul habits. (Princess also likes to cover her scent by rolling in any wild animal poop she can find. SO delightful cleaning her up! It’s always all over her face and neck.)
Thanks for mentioning Puddleglum – one of the great Lewis characters and so often overlooked!
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Paula 🙂 Dogs are weird and have foul habits….
Always been a Puddleglum fan. One of Nancy’s Eeyore characters.
The vet tells me that cats have hugely sensitive noses and therefore prefer rain water as it is chlorine free. Maybe the same for dogs?
Quite possibly 🙂 Then again, Mac does love his putridity.
What a delightful way to meet you. I had to come, of course, after you dropped by my place. And once here, the title “Puddleglum” was irresistible. (I should have known it was C.S. Lewis.) I look forward to future visits when I have time to explore further.
PiedType, thanks for coming over. That was a moving piece over at yours today. Hard to live in a world where that happens.
CS Lewis knew what he was doing, didn’t he? The character was based on his gardener who was, in character at least, a carbon copy. I wish I could have met him.
For some perverse reason, Puddleglum was my hero in earlier days!
I now precisey why. He was a Marsh Wiggle of considerable resilience, perseverance and steadfast honour 🙂
Facinating… A post about puddles, of all things. You reminded me of the book of illustrated nursery rhymes my mother read to me as a toddler; in particular the sight of Dr Gloucester up to his middle in a puddle. This made me very wary of jumping in puddles. My own toddler loves to jump in puddles, and I fear reading her that same book may diminish her enjoyment somewhat! (She did jump into the creek with her gumboots on the other day, and got a big fright, mainly because the gumboots have holes in them.)
That said, we don’t get enough rain here in Australia. This year has been exceptionally wet, but after long dry spells there’s nothing quite like the ‘smell of rain’. Since we all drive our cars dirty when there’s a water shortage, there’s also nothing quite like the greasy slime you get when those first droplets hit your windscreen. I never had to do this in New Zealand, but here if it starts to rain while I’m driving, it’s good practice to squirt out a bit of detergent and quite a lot of water to go with, otherwise you end up with a streak of sludge across the windscreen.
Mosquitoes are also a problem around here when there are puddles, especially further north where disease carrying breeds are thriving.
Australia sounds like the other end of the sprectrum, Lynley: to us, puddles are a way of life and to you, a godsend. Your comment is so evocative I can almost feel the dessicated land before rainfall. And hear those mosquitos buzzing.
CS Lewis created him to escort a pair of children into the very bowels of Narnia to rescue a prince who had been imprisoned by an evil enchantress. He is a Marsh Wiggle: an impossibly tall, thin figure, rather too amphibious for comfort and relentlessly morose. Everything about him is damp and redolent of pond weed.
One cannot help but adore him from introductions alone: “Puddleglum’s my name,” he tells the pair, “but it doesn’t matter if you forget it.”
Puddleglum does, indeed, sound a bit like Christopher Robin’s Eeyore. And he reminds me of Uriah Heep as well:
[Uriah’s face] was quite as cadaverous as it had looked in the window, though in the grain of it there was that tinge of red which is sometimes to be observed in the skins of red-haired people. It belonged to a red-haired person—a youth of fifteen, as I take it now, but looking much older—whose hair was cropped as close as the closest stubble; who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a long, lank, skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my attention, as he stood at the pony’s head, rubbing his chin with it, and looking up at us in the chaise.
The character is notable for his cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity, making frequent references to his own “‘umbleness”.
The dirty rotten scoundrel!
I read these posts about MaCauley and am delighted that we don’t have a canine who wishes to muck about in the mucky piddles. 😀
It is good not to have something which revels in puddles, Nancy. You’d never catch a cat putting a paw near one.
Wonderful comparisons to Dicken’s antihero – I must go back and read my Heap again. I have been away too long.
Ah, puddles…reminds me of childhood and puddle jumping in the rain. And I love CS Lewis / Chronicles of Narnia!
Thanks for stopping by my blog! 🙂
It was a lovely read, Emily 🙂 I love your writing style and salt pots in equal measure 🙂
I should have named our Lulubelle Puddleglum, it’s perfect for her. In fact Stinkerbelle would have been a good choice too. She loves what (I think) Kurt Vonnegut Jr calles ‘puddle hunting and frog popping’.
Ah, Kurt! another author from which I have been away too long! That is the perfect phrase to describe what they do….
I always liked Puddleglum; he reminds me of my Dad 🙂
Puddles are glorious. We would get torrential rain in SA and afterwards, my young son would wade naked, up to his knees, except for his puddle-filled wellies.
Wading up to ones knees in a puddle must be an amazing thing! The closest most of us to using puddles for leisure is puddle-surfing using a skim board. Fab stuff.
LOL…great post, Kate! It’s wonderful to see the dogs having a ball in the puddles, although I’m really enjoying our brilliant blue skies today 🙂
We have bluer skies back today, thank goodness, Naomi. It would be nice for them to stay. We love our puddles….but we love our sun more….
There are still puddles and piddles here on the cutoff, Kate. I may have to do a Jemima Puddle Duck waddle and stomp in one – scare up the mosquitoes. I loved this post and reminder of Puddleglum.
You last line grabbed me and holds quite a bit of social comment in it. “And Puddleglum is another personification of our relationship with our land, which spends so much of its life partially submerged in shallow pools of water.” Here in the States we’ve mired in a bit of mess these days. I’m tempted to change the very last word from water to muck and send it to Congress!
Oh, Penny, every news bulletin carries another grim update from the stock markets. I pray things stabilise….
I always wondered if the cloak immediately sank and tripped her up in nasty wet folds.
We live with dust patches more often than long-lasting puddles
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he put the cloak down, Sidey.
The more I hear of South Africa, the more i yearn to see it…
Once during a cycle ride a glasses case or some such was lost. We had been out with boys on the back in child seats, and the loss was discovered after we got home. The little door on the back of one child seat had opened itself…
I went back down the lane and as far as the large puddle (as wide as the road and about three times as long) where we remembered there had been quite a jolting over rough ground – only to discover completely opaque muddy water. So I took off my shoes and walked through the puddle systematically, feeling with my toes for the lost article. Mud squelched up between the gaps and the puddle was warm from the sun and I was highly amused by it all, hoping desperately that no one would come by and catch me. Lost article was not found 🙂
You had a lovely paddle, though, Pseu 🙂 Lovely story.
If there’s anything better than a morning after (rain, that is) spent tramping through puddles to one’s heart’s content, I’d like to know what it is. At least, that’s what I thought as a child. Even now puddles hold a fascination for me, though I am careful to walk around rather than in them. But then I live in a city. I have a feeling that if I lived in the country and thought no one would see, I’d be tromping through every puddle like any old kid… or dog. 🙂
Puddleglee 😉
Now there’s a flipside 🙂 Puddleglee expresses it perfectly, Ruth. Thanks!
As a child of desert, I find your descriptions delightfully alien. Puddles tend to take a different connotation here, as places of brilliant and fast-paced life that plays out generations in a handful weeks, and any puddle that lasts from one rain to the next becomes the center of life for tens of miles.
It is their rarity value, I guess, Connor. Life has to take any opportunities it can get. I’d love to see a puddle from that part of the world in action. Ours are so complacent.
Enchanting and inspiring post! Your mythic puddles have started the engine of my imagination…
Excellent! That’s quite an engine! Nothing like a puddle to inspire….