STORM FRONT II

In many ways, I suppose that I should be grateful that recently I’ve been rather “lucky” when it comes to catching those elusive storm fronts as they pass overhead. Firstly I managed to get the one passing over Moelfre in July which I “shared” yesterday, and then I was able to take a snapshot of this one passing over Harwich on August 25th.

Despite the relative infrequency of actually witnessing this slightly bizarre yet most fascinating of natural phenomena, within a month of catching the first, I got another chance and managed to see a second.

I suppose it must have been something to do with being nearer the coast and watching the clouds as they attempt to make the leap from being over water to being over land and all that it entails for them. I also imagine that those of you who spend a lot of time in the vicinity of the shoreline are wondering what the heck I’m going on about and why I’m finding it all so surprising.

Well, you might find such things commonplace, but in the land-locked and hilly county in which I live, such things are far more occasional occurrences. Usually I wake up to slate grey skies stretching from horizon to horizon and even on those ever-so-rare bright and sunny, blue skied days, the drifting and combining of clouds can be a much more subtle and gentle affair which creeps up on you slowly, perhaps gently easing its drizzle down upon you before letting rip and dropping its full load of rain on top of you like a circus clown who’s just managed to gain your trust…

Clowns, eh…?

Never to be trusted.

It’s one of the advantages of a soggy old summer, I suppose, that wherever you may end up going for your “mini-breaks” will find you out and about with a camera in your hand during the longer hours of daylight and, as yet another storm heads towards you, you do at least get to see it in all its majesty.

“Every cloud has a silver lining” and all that…

Anyway, I’m sure that you’ll be chuffed to little mintballs to learn that we made it back to the car without being pummelled by raindrops the size of small kittens or hailstones as hard as glass and the first drops of rain splashed onto the windscreen as he were heading back along the byways between the cornfields as we actually passed through the curtain of water that was the storm front itself which was all very dramatic but did mean that dining alfresco was off the agenda for the rest of that day.