Lee Randall: One wet blanket too many over 13 years

I am scunnered with stair rods, over auld wives and pipe staples, and done with dreep. I am pooped from being perished wi' the cauld 12 months out of 12. Scotland and its sodden weather have done for me.

While it's fair to say that winters here in Edinburgh are far less frigid than they are in my home town of New York - which, despite sharing a latitude with Madrid, gets insanely cold - the summers here simply aren't. I'm still sleeping under two great duvets, one filled with lambswool, the other with goose down. I haven't left home in July or August without a cardigan since 1998. At last count, I owned two pairs of waterproof shoes, seven umbrellas, and four bottles of sunscreen that, quite frankly, expired in 2008, and were, in fact, purchased on a multi-buy offer ahead of a trip to Umbria.

I am wildly homesick for sweltering New York summers, when the heat is so blistering that midway through a tepid morning shower you commence sweating again. I pine for the days when I'd lie on my bed, torpid with temperature, begging the universe to send the merest whiff of a breeze. I want to be too hot to eat. I yearn to feel sticky, deliquescing tar lift up on my shoe's soles with every plodding step.

But no, here's another weekend forecast calling for rain (today), heavy rain tomorrow(), with thunder showers to chase us down the road to work come Monday. This news is bound to send a swarm of Morningside matrons scurrying to their pharmacists for refills of Prozac, and there's sure to be a run on quality gin at neighbourhood off licences.

And who can blame them? I was out of the country last weekend, but I'm reliably informed that Morningside Road became Morningside River, and that households at the foot of Balcarres Street watched all manner of aquatic flotsam stream in over their lintels.

Elsewhere in this dowie land, a sump of rain bucketed down on Castle Stuart, forcing the Scottish Open to scale back to just 54 holes. (So say the papers. In truth, I've no idea what significance that figure bears, not being remotely interested in golf, but it's no strain on the brain to surmise that if they've seen fit to mention it, then the havoc caused by our freakish weather represents a huge economic and sporting loss for Scotland and for this northern links course.)

Thirty years ago, a dear friend told me I could never move to Britain because I wasn't prepared to talk about the weather. It seems she was half right - I'm no longer sure if I can live with the weather, never mind employ it as a conversation starter.

But I've always admired plucky heroines, and in that spirit, I began casting around for a workable plan to make the best out of my soggy circumstances - preferably something I can accomplish from beneath my duvets, for I find all this inclement weather acutely enervating.

While placing a grocery order for industrial quantities of coffee (for my money, the world's best mood elevator) and searching for BOGOF offers on cheap intoxicants, I had a potentially life-changing brainwave: When life sends you rain, grow mushrooms!

Not just any mushrooms, mind. If I'm to dry out my drookit self and feel the heat in my bones again, I'll undoubtedly require a long-haul plane ticket to someplace where they are actually acquainted with the sun. Such flights don't come cheaply.

So there will be no button, chestnut or Portobello. You can keep your Enokis and oysters, your straws and your Blewits. I'm giving over my dark, dank corners to the costliest fungi in the world, the Japanese Matsutake. Thanks to a shortage, the highest grade of these mushrooms can retail for up to 1,241 per kilogram. Which just goes to show that in every rain-laden cloud there lurks a cheering waterglow.