Clarity

I remember my grandfather telling me that these visible beams of sunlight, looking like a spotlight from the sky, are "the sun sucking water up into the clouds." Of all the strange and, to a young mind, mystifying things that happen in childhood, why did my memory chose to retain that one? I wonder if it was the first time an adult told me something to which my reaction was scepticism, and the shock of realising that I couldn't believe everything I was told imprinted it. Or perhaps it was the first time I chose not to express my doubt, instead deciding to keep it to myself and find out independently - because I know that's what I did. The earth shifted slightly on its axis and I saw a new way to deal with the world; that would be worth remembering. Probably it was just his way of entertaining a child. He'd raised five of his own, plus one adopted and two lost to disease in infancy, so he had a few stories in reserve

The thing is, he wasn't really wrong, I eventually realised. If sunlight is getting through, it is warming water somewhere, as well as provoking plants to transpire. It is generating water vapour, and some of that will make it to higher levels in the atmosphere and condense into cloud. Maybe that is what he had been taught - it was his proud boast that he had gone to school "regular" until he was eleven - and his way of précising that was his explanation to me. He had me puzzled for a while though

People not always saying quite what they mean: I have been following the story about the radioactive capsule, lost in the outback of Western Australia during transit from a mine to the city of Perth. Thankfully, it has been found; the regional emergency services minister must be a very relieved man, but I got a smile out of his failure to curb his enthusiasm about the six-day “relentless search” that found it. "... locating this object was a monumental challenge,” he said. “The search groups have quite literally found the needle in the haystack.” No children, they literally haven't