Any would-be artist coming out of their teenage years has to recognize the characters’ jolly experimentation, pomposity, and (above all) fear. The world is your oyster. Trouble is the oyster can bite down hard and fast.
From where I’m sitting it is positively Noachian. The rain continues to pelt the skylight and Cyrus gets a walk not when it stops raining, but when the downpours lessen. The rail at the front of the Aga is constantly draped with the trousers we all wore the last time we went out, and the fields are a mush of what Uncle Monty would call “beastly mud and oomska”.