Weather

We drove back through the most extraordinary weather from Toulouse tonight. I had been there over the weekend for a crime book festival, and we set off for home at 5.30pm in glorious sunshine - with no idea what awaited us.

The festival had earlier celebrated the 10th anniversary of Rouergue Noir, the crime imprint of my French publisher, which was inaugurated by the first of my China Thrillers way back in 2004. At a special retrospective, myself, my editor, Nathalie Demoulin, and writers Dan Waddell (son of Sid) and Colin Niel (a vrais français, in spite of how the name might seem), were presented with a cake, replete with candle, and foaming glasses of bubbly.

We had heard on the news that Montpellier to the south had been ravaged by storms and flooding overnight, but there was no hint of it as we headed north in the sunshine. But beyond Montauban we saw the sky ahead turn blue-black, a double rainbow forming, and a kind of white mist descending on the motorway.

Suddenly cars were firing up their hazards and pulling into the hard shoulder, and seeking shelter under flyovers. Hailstones the size of golfballs came crashing out of the mist in a torrent of rain. To even attempt to drive through it would have smashed windscreens. And all the while sunshine still slanted incongruously in under the clouds from the west, lighting up the entire scene like the set of a horror movie. But still it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead as the sky continued to spit vicious hailstone at us from a burned out haze. All three lanes of motorway had ground to a halt.

It only seemed to last a few minutes before the hailstones gave way to even heavier rain, and flash flooding obliterated the road. Eventually, after another five to ten minutes, everyone slowly got back on the move, hazards still flashing. It took another fifteen before we emerged from the cloud into more startling sunshine and, incredibly, a dry road.

Then all the rest of the way home we were treated to the most bizarrely turbulent skies, dramatic cloud formations underlit from the west. Just beyond Gramat I pulled into a side road to try to capture it all on camera. And this was the result. But when I got back into the car it was to be greeted by an excited babble from Janice who said she had just seen, and photographed, a UFO, as she was trying to get a picture of me taking this pic.

I don't know what she saw, and I can't begin to explain it. Neither can she. But you can read her account of it here.

We finally got home as darkness fell, with lightning flashing all around the house. Both shaken and a little unsettled by the power of nature and the mystery of the inexplicable.