A spot of rain

As I drove the first few of the 35kms from work to home there were big black clouds on the horizon. Sooty black clouds. There were flashes of lightning criss crossing the clouds. The rain that has been threatening to fall for the last few days was about to arrive. True there had been a fine mist of rain this morning but generally it was still fair to say that we hadn't had any rain since May.

As the car ploughed through rivers of water, as the temperature dropped from the high twenties to around 15ºC I thought that at least it was something for this blog. I stopped thinking about the blog as I put the wipers onto their highest speed, turned on all of the fog lights and moved the heater controls from air con to heat to clear the misted up screen. I stopped thinking about the blog and worried more about the driving. I couldn't see anything out of the windscreen and the torrents of brown water pouring off the fields had spread sheets of large sump breaking rocks across the road. I fretted that the noise pounding through the car wasn't just rain but included hail as well. The hail is often so big and so powerful around here that it pounds dents into car bodywork. We had one hail storm not so long ago that dsetroyed sheds, smashed windscreens, cracked roof tiles and pulverized outdoor furniture to matchwood or shards of plastic.

Extreme weather I thought. That can be the theme for the piece but the truth is it hasn't been that extreme recently. Well I suppose no rain for four months is pretty extreme but we've had none of the winds that sound powerful enough to rip bits off buildings and bring down trees. And whilst it's been hot for months and people have complained and complained about the heat we haven't recorded a temperture over 40ºC in our back yard all summer. Normally we do.

So the entry on extreme weather can wait until it gets properly cold and we're freezing every moment that we're inside the house, until the rain digs huge ruts into our track, until the wind brings down the televion aerial and rips branches off the trees.

One good thing about the weather was that it made me forget all about trying to stop a revolt amongst five year olds ostensibly in my class to learn English. Torrential rain is a lot more fun.