We enjoyed a banging thunderstorm this morning! It happened rather handily during that period between waking up and doing the school run. There was one crack of thunder in particular that felt like it was right out of Hollywood! It followed a blinding strike of lightning, which is what you see in the picture above.
Some of the rain managed to find its way into the house after I’d earlier opened a few windows to let a brief non-Saharan breeze flow in. Then the power went out. There’s enough energy in a bolt of lightning to power a home for several months, yet ironically this bolt of lightning took our power away. It’s almost like the clouds are sucking the energy out of our home and redistributing it elsewhere. Typical clouds, coming over here, taking our energy.
Most of the energy tied up in our house is in our eight-year-old son. He’s like an undiscovered oil field in the North Sea, or one of those plasma globes that you put your hands on to make your hair stand on end. If any energy companies found out about him, we’d be in trouble. They’d be harvesting him like there’s no tomorrow, fracking his face off so their share price and profits would surge even more than they currently are in this energy crisis.
What normally happens after a few days of heat is that a thunderstorm rolls across, dumps a load of rain on us, then cleaner, cooler air follows behind it. Not today. What’s followed has been a slightly more intense and invasive heat, so everyone feels disgusting again. A whole nation’s productivity took a nosedive this week just because everyone was feeling irritable.
You’ve got to feel for Gosport, though. They recorded the highest ever temperature for June (36.1°C), a figure that’s stood for 50 years, and they only got to hold that trophy for 24 hours when Merryfield in Somerset took it from them (36.7°C). And then Santon Downham in Suffolk snatched it from them today (37.3°C). If they can just see out the next few days, the record will sit with them for at least a year. That’s the way to do it — storm in at the end, score a goal deep into injury time.
The only blot on my copybook today was using the phrase ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ twice on Zoom calls when talking about the heat. I’m better than that.
