STORM FRONT

I don’t know. Perhaps it was the “post-holiday blues,” or perhaps it was just because I’d slipped into a slightly different sleep pattern by being away, or maybe it’s just that, having taken some time away from all things “keyboard-y”, the point of sitting at keyboards rattling out drivvle to a world that still seemed almost entirely focussed on the “Festival of Hoops” (at least as far as our local media was concerned – and by “local” I meant “UK broadcasters” obviously…), seemed at best indistinct and at worst, utterly without meaning. Basically, words seemed to be rather tough to come by at that particular moment on that particular day.

(Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth…)

Anyway, in the traditional spirit that “a picture speaks a thousand words” and as a kind of “coda” to my set of snapshots of those rather spectacular clouds which I shared with you on another “difficult” morning, I thought I’d share this photograph I took of a storm front as it passed over the village of Moelfre on July 26th 2012.

I only remember being quite so vividly aware of a storm “passing through” on one previous occasion as I watched a curtain of rain pass from left to right in front of me as we stood on our own front doorstep one summer’s day a few years ago, and it kept us (and one or two of the neighbours) mesmerised as it did so, such is the visual power of the weather to invoke the deeply buried race memories of the ancient magics in our terrified little human souls.

The subsequent electrical storm was pretty spectacular too, I seem to recall.

However, when it comes to that week, well, maybe it was because we were near the coast, but I’ve personal rarely seen such a distinct line being drawn in the sky between the darkness and the light and, over the course of the next half hour or so, I’m happy to report (believe it or not) that the light overwhelmed the darkness and forced it back out to sea, leading to a bright but slightly chilly summer’s evening which meant that there were some astonishing lighting effects to be seen across the flat water later, and there was an eerie stillness in the air as the sea mists blotted out the view of the distant headlands and the world was transformed into a monochrome one made up almost solely of shades of blue with just a hint of other colours thanks to the gaudy intervention of the plastic designs created by humanity.

More than one person described this view across the bay as being “spooky” and the imagination was indeed fired up with ideas of ghost ships, smuggler’s coves, pirates and, because there are so many of them around that deceptively quiet part of the world where the relative calmness of the land so suddenly meets the wild and elemental forces of the sea, the souls lost in the various wrecks around that coastline stirring in Davy Jones’ locker…