STORM CLOUDS

The storm broke just after midnight.  It had been building all day.  The atmosphere had been sultry since the early morning.  Heavy cloud had obscured the sun and the air was so full of moisture you could hardly breathe.  The temperature had climbed to twenty-five degrees, and the hygroscope on the back garden wall showed 80% humidity.  A flash of lightning and a throaty rumble of thunder woke me immediately. I stumbled out of bed to the bedroom window.  My eyes were seared by a stab of lightning that illuminated the other side of the street like floodlights on a tennis court.  The next roll of thunder sounded like the knell of doom.  It was directly overhead.   It was as if the eye of the storm was immediately above my house. I had never known thunder so close, so loud.  It was as if two giant dinosaurs were beating seven bells out of each other just above my head.  I saw the next fork of lightning smash down to earth it seemed only yards away, and the recurrent booming thunder shook the very foundations of the house.  For no logical reason, I went from room to room, closing windows.  The little black spaniel lay terrified in one corner of the bedroom, desperate for somewhere to hide.  I went back to my post at the window.  I wished I had my camera so that I could record the incredible scene before me.  On reflection, I realised that the camera would be useless.  By the time it had geared itself up to photograph a streak of lightning, the lightning would have gone and all that would have been on the photograph was black. I would have had to take the photograph in the dark, and hope that the lightning would flash at the same time as the shutter opened.  The odds were on another completely black photo, and I wasn’t going to waste my time photographing the equivalent of a black curtain inside a tomb.  I’m not in the least avant garde.  After fifteen minutes or so of the Somme, circa 1916, there was a pause in the rolling and rumbling.  ‘Good’, I though, ‘That’s the storm finished.  Now I can go back to bed, and sleep.’  I have devised a method of getting back to sleep quickly, involving the names of football teams, starting with ‘A’ and working through to ‘Z’.  By the time I reach ‘Jarrow Town’, I am generally be in the Land of Nod, which saves me from trying to conjure up teams whose names start with ‘X’ or ‘Z’.  I turned back to the window in time to see someone turn on a celestial hosepipe.  These weren’t just droplets of rain – this was a solid sheet of water, and all I needed was a chap in a barrel to complete the illusion of Niagara Falls.  Within a minute, the street was awash, and I had visions of having to repeat my performance in the last flash flood, which was to stand at the garage door with a brush vainly trying, Canute-like, to turn back the tide.  So vigorously was I then sweeping, when the brush handle snapped, I thought my leg had gone. Within minutes the rain had eased, which allowed Thor and his giant hammer and anvil to crash back onto the scene, accompanied by lightning flashes so close that I imagined they would earth via my television aerial and the house would be reduced to rubble.  Then, after half an hour, the storm got fed up and moved away to bother people in Eyemouth and Berwick, and I could crawl wearily back to bed: 'Aston Villa, Burnley, Cardiff City, Derby County, Fulham, Gillingham…z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z’.   This morning, the sun shone down delightfully and there was fresh elfin breeze that made the day very pleasant indeed, quite removing the horrors of last night.  I spoke to my next-door-neighbour. ‘How did you get on with that storm last night?  Any structural damage?  Coping stones alright?  Satellite dish still in position? Trees still standing?’  She looked at me blankly.  ‘Storm?  What storm?’