"[Alice] listens to the rain hammering on the roof of the tent. Chucking down; raining stair-rods. Presumably the Celts had their own colloquialisms for bad weather. She thinks about all the language that should hang in the air up here, centuries of it, the reverberations of a million exchanges about love and war, birth and death, and what to have for supper."

~Penelope Lively, Making It Up