THUNDERBOLTS AND LIGHTNING

(VERY, VERY FRIGHTENING)

I was sitting in the room at the top of the house the other day, toiling away as I am paid to, and being very much focussed upon the project I’m currently working on whilst trying very hard not to be too distracted by the patch of bright blue sky that was so temptingly taunting me through the small square of the skylight above my head. That window was open just enough to let me hear the birdsong and soothe me, whilst also letting in enough of a breeze for the temperature to remain tolerable and to allow the occasional passing wasp to fly in, have a nose around and escape again after bashing its brains against the window pane for a few moments.

I was so tuned in to whatever it was that I was doing that I barely noticed the sudden drop in temperature and the darkness as it descended. Perhaps on some level I thought that night had fallen and I’d been so engrossed in some tricky little problem that I’d failed to appreciate how much time had passed, but, as the glow of the screen seemed to be becoming pretty much the only light source on that previously beautifully sunny afternoon, I shivered and got up to block out the birdsong by closing the window.

Incidentally, earlier on I’d heard the distant electronic voice of a tannoy making some kind of announcement. I couldn’t make out a word and had dashed downstairs just after it had stopped to see if I could hear the message more clearly. This had led to an anxious couple of hours expecting the electricity or the water supply to be suddenly switched off, which meant almost obsessive pounding of those “save” buttons, but I have once more digressed from the point in order to ponder yet another imponderable. I still don’t know what was being announced, but I suspect that it was not a storm warning, and it does prove to me that if ever some disaster should ever occur in the heart of Lesser Blogfordshire, I’m likely to be found stone cold, unprotected and oblivious to the last. I wonder if there’s more truth in that theory about some of the victims of Pompeii than some of the more uplifting ones you hear…?

Meanwhile, back at the gathering storm…

Suddenly, in the middle of a clear, bright day of endless blue skies, the black storm clouds gathered. It’s that sudden darkness that gets to you. Well, that and the unexpected raging winds causing the trees to thrash about wildly and it’s not so very long after that happens before the rain starts to thump against the roof tiles and the windows sounding for all the world as if all the devil’s machine guns have been turned in your direction and fired. Still, at least I was indoors and not having to dash through the hammering rain whilst dressed for a bright summer’s day like some of the people I saw tearing along the road when I glanced out of the window and gratefully sipped at my coffee.

Then it begins. Before you know it there’s the distant rumbling and those sudden alarming flashes of light. Then the rumbling starts to get closer and louder and the time from the flash to the bang gets shorter and shorter telling you in no uncertain terms that the dark heart of the storm is getting nearer and nearer. When the flashes and the bangs are almost simultaneous and the whole house shakes despite its solid looking walls, then you know that you’re right in the middle of things and its time to just hold on and wait for the worst of it to pass you by.

I’m not generally one who is frightened of thunderstorms, but I understand that there are many who are, and if they aren’t suffering themselves, then the effect it has upon their nearest and dearest, be they human or animal, can still make them very wary. I have been told over the years of people having very bad experiences, with all their electronic gizmos being destroyed by an unfortunate lightning strike or of ball lightning chasing them across the room, which must be a very alarming thing to have happen to you. Still, I guess none of these things are anything like as terrifying as the kinds of storms that brew up tornadoes and hurricanes in other parts of the world, so I suppose we should at least be thankful about that as we sit shivering and quaking in the darkness. I was reminded, however, of the true hold that extreme weather conditions have over our imaginations when noticed that the pictures of an aeroplane landing in a thunderstorm that same day managed to become another of those dubious delights, the so-called “internet sensation” which generally seems to involve a lot of people getting terribly excited about a bad thing happening to someone else.

Despite not wishing to ally myself with all that kind of bandwagon leaping, thunderstorms do sometimes still manage to fascinate me. In fact, one or two of my fondest memories involve thunderstorms. I remember being about ten years old and being on holiday with my parents and staying up late one night and just sitting on a balcony in a Yugoslavian hotel with my father, both of us watching a huge storm out at sea and being mesmerised by the seemingly endless jagged fork lightning sparking along the horizon on a scale that I’d never witnessed before. I also remember standing on my own front doorstep many years later watching a storm front literally move across from the hills on my left towards the town on my right as if it was a curtain of rain being drawn. There was some spectacular lightning that afternoon, too.

Of course it doesn’t matter how much you’re told how unlikely it is that you’ll ever be actually struck by lightning, the fact still remains that people are and with around 16 million lightning storms happening across our planet every year, I guess we should be a little bit cautious and not go out in the rain flying our kites or walking around with long metal poles, and avoid standing under trees, especially ones that look to be a little bit past their prime and in danger of losing large chunks of themselves at the slightest provocation. Apparently the Empire State Building in New York City is struck by lightning anything up to 500 times a year and has been known to be struck a dozen times in twenty minutes, so maybe just a bit of caution isn’t the worst thing to have. After all, you are dealing with a phenomenon which an travel at up to 140,000 miles per hour and reach temperatures of 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is not something to be messing around with or taking too lightly.

Still, as you sit snugly in your home, listening to the thunder crashing all around you and the water drops beating their insane rhythms as they thump against the glass, and being occasionally suddenly illuminated by the flashing sky outside, you can sometimes start to wonder quite how close it’s going to get to you, and about how worried you ought to be getting. I also find myself starting to wonder about everything electrical in the house that’s still plugged in and whether it’s advisable for it to be so. I have some mad theory that if the lightning strikes the TV aerial (yes, I do still have one…), it will be fine because that is attached to the house which is mostly attached to the ground and so the whole thing will be earthed and protected. Also, if the plug is in, surely that’s earthed too, isn’t it? People used to have strange ideas about TV sets and lightning which I’m pretty sure the science doesn’t back up when you start to really think about it.

But afterwards, once the storm has moved away and the rain stops, and the clouds part and another shaft of sunlight tentatively probes its way through them, the air seems so clear, and so fresh, and all that sticky humidity has magically gone and the world seems to be a beautiful place to be in again.

I guess that’s what comes of having a silver lining, which, even though I am a great big pessimist, I can sometimes admit to the existence of.