This sentiment is very much alive today. I'm always surprised how I seem to be the only person carrying an umbrella in London when it rains. Especially bankers seem to prefer getting soaked.
If you're a banker in London you're inundated with free umbrellas, as they're the gift de-facto on attending any kind of event. Nice, big, very big, very good quality, umbrellas (with said host company's logo).
You're also probably wearing a decent wool suit, and decent wool suits, Super-100s and above, not that expensive, and by design of nature, are completely shower-proof. Not rain-proof, but shower-proof. When getting to the destination, they just need a bash to bounce off any droplets that have stuck to the exterior (don't wipe, doing so will force the droplets into the fabric).
However, my feeling is that the real lunacy here is having very narrow pavements (sidewalks) carrying dozens or hundreds of people while having streets, which might be carrying ten or twenty people along the same stretch of road in taxis (which most cars are in Dublin city centre on a weekday morning), get 8-10x as much space. (I am much more sympathetic to buses).
But then in NYC you develop a much closer "personal bubble" when you have to endure being crammed onto the train like a sardine during rush hour, so in comparison a little umbrella bumping is barely noticeable.
I love this (presumably automatic) characterization from:
https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-precipitatio...
"A lot of rain (rainy season) falls in the months: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December."
Yeah, sounds about right.
I mean it rains a bit but reputation for rain is far in excess of the reality if you were to compare it with many north American cities.
Have a look at http://www.worldclimate.com/ to compare. London is pretty dry.
In London, rain is much lighter, but much more frequent and much less predictable. So carrying an umbrella is a must.
I forgot this on my last trip to London. It was sunny when I got on the underground at Heathrow. By the time I got to central London, it was pouring, and I was soaked by the time I had walked to the office.
Coats, hats, and hoodies are much more common than are umbrellas, unless it's raining cats and dogs.
China Mieville - Un Lun Dun
Why isn't driving a car, or any motorized vehicle, similarly seen as a weakness?
Weird, I'm always surprised at how almost every seems to have an umbrella ready to use in London.
I think to really get a representative feel of average London, it's necessary to survey somewhere like Ealing or New Cross.
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l'm not gay. Unless you're from Newcastle, and by "gay" you mean "owns a coat".
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I walked to work in Portland for two years, and while the streets were normally wet and it had clearly been raining recently, there were only a handful of days where I actually got wet during the half hour I was walking. I never carried an umbrella.
Compare that to England, where the rain will wait until you're a few hundred yards out of your house, then attack from otherwise sunny skies to blast you from dead sideways with that particularly English tiny-dropped dense-yet-light-seeming rain that soaks your clothes completely in two minutes flat. Then it will stop and let you carry on to your destination wet.
You can never leave the house here unprepared.
That's right, it's a constant drizzle, but rarely anything more.
Lived there for just four months, but it was the fall "rainy season", and I barely ever used my umbrella.
Tangentially, most Seattle-lites also didn't understand what I meant when I said Seattle has a lot of drizzle, but it doesn't have rain; growing up in the midwest with midwest thunderstorms, a lot of them didn't seem to understand what I meant by the smell of a storm or the greenish color of the sky as a thunderhead approaches.
We all get prideful for various things, I guess though...I know far too many folk from back in WI who insist they can drive perfectly in any weather, despite having wrecked multiple cars in winters past.
Nothing as bad as my mom's hometown a bit further to the north (Ketchikan).
I have long since matured past that and it seems like within the past decade things have changed a bit here