Rain chronicles

(This continues from yesterday’s updated entry).

It’s 5.42am and dark as sin and the warm up act has finally arrived. Booming but indistinct thunder and flashing lights. Heavy but slightly fitful rain. The rain radar showing red but none of the purple that indicates a really strong cell.

I shut the last windows, pull out the router and get back into bed. The mobile signal pops away to Emergency only.

This initial salvo just brushes alongside us, not developing into a real downpour. Steadier rain now, like a slow roll on a snare drum. Torrential we can do without. The real downburst smasher does just that, flattening young plants (my third planting of courgette and cucumber) and turning the clay soil into a soggy terracotta.

Earlier in the night, after one o’clock, strange handfuls of big-dropped rain fell, as if the humidity simply had to let some moisture out. It felt like someone running their knuckles down the window pains and the strange and random intermittence bigged up the immensity and towering height of the sky above our very bedroom. The giant atmospheric column bearing down on us like a funnel, and us so far from Kansas.

Back in the here and now the thunder has drifted off to the south (although later I see the storm was moving north.) The rain comes and goes. It’s showing 18.1C outside with 91% humidity. 24.5C and 72% inside.

And now the rain has gone and the 4G signal is back. Not a soaking but a beginning. The forecast suggests there is plenty more to come. Time to open some shutters and let the cool in.

I should have left a glass on a wall to tell me when it was half full or empty. I incline to the half empty these days.

It turns out we got 1.5cm in the first act. (Although the ridiculous German weather station seems to have missed it all.)

The second act went missing entirely. We were stuck between two West End stages, two streams of super wet air passing to the north and to the south. Like being stuck in the slow central line as express trains belt by, kicking up dust in your eye.

I looked up compound words for ‘greed for rain’ and ‘rain envy’ but Google was being particularly stupid, coming up with popular songs and videos for a thing called a sou’wester.

Still we had a Final Act. Swirling wind, rain pouring in shutters before I got them shut. Hilary Mantel took a soaking, her third volume making a good window catch.

2cm in all. One tank full and the other one less replete and less important now as I can pump from our spring. I spent a while decanting water around the estate, secreting stores for those needy times.

Later we found the back door double glazing outer glass had been stoved in (or out). And the repaired tyre was flat a-bloody-gain. Dodgy valve I reckon set of by the low pressure (not). .

The door was probably caught in a big gust and slammed shut as we watched the storm. Some tomato plants supported by bailer twine slumped to the ground under their immense weight of fruit but that was soon put right.

We ate a late lunch in the blessed coolness, a fine south westerly studding-sail breeze making it feel like a soft Scottish afternoon in late summer.

Tuscany received 30,000 lightning strikes overnight and an awful tragedy occurred further north on the coast at Marina Di Massa where two sleeping children were killed when a tree fell on their tent.

How terribly sad this world can be.