Working at home today, I thought, after lunch, I would just go out and stretch my legs for a bit. Great timing; this was taken only a few minutes later. On the other hand, this was actually the most interesting thing to happen today.
Umbra in Latin means ‘shade’, a sign that the umbrella was originally designed to protect against the sun. But this was not the application required in Hebden Bridge this afternoon. I believe this outrage against good weather can officially be termed ‘Storm Dudley’.
After another hot and dry day it was a surprise when Hebden was drenched by a substantial storm in the early evening; such things can be expected in high summer, of course, but the surprise came more because there weren’t really all that many clouds around, and the sun mostly kept shining throughout. But rain it did, and hard; these two were not the only ones scuttling for cover.
The village of South Milford, east of Leeds, makes an exceptionally wet debut on the blog, and thus a rather grim one, despite being a pleasant place that hosted me entertainingly enough this afternoon. But it was damp, oh yes indeed.
The underdwellings beneath Lee Mill Road rise above our allotment. We were there this afternoon, doing a filthy job in filthy weather, caught in the tag end of this revolting hail storm that blew over as the sun went down. I hope this is the end of the storm in a broader sense too — it’s been another weekend of severe weather, not so much round here this time as further south. A grim period all round.
I know this is a lousy picture. I’m sorry. It’s a lousy picture to have been in a position to take, too. All previous eulogies to the good weather of 2020 were decisively blown away overnight and this morning by Storm Ciara, a vicious little wannabe hurricane that blasted in, savagely dumped its load on Hebden Bridge and left the town, for the fourth time in the last eight years, under a layer of water [*]. I could have gone outside and taken pictures of the flooding but if you’ll forgive me, the prospect was too depressing. If I abrogate my duty as some kind of social commentator by doing so, my apologies — the vultures in their TV vans will doubtless be supplying the world with pictures of it all soon enough; while evading the real issues and reasons behind flooding, which are (around here anyway) to do with inequalities of power and status. And yet people vote Conservative, over and over again.
[*] The three previous occasions in the lifetime of this blog were 22/6/12 — 9/7/12 — and 26/12/15.
Now that’s a substantial drop in the air pressure. These days the Met Office give names to all the UK’s various stormy moments, which makes it all very media-friendly. But hey, here’s me doing my own media thing so let’s pay tribute to the incoming Storm Brendan and hope it doesn’t screw up my next couple of days too much.
Back to work, back to Manchester. Walking home through the city under threatening clouds, strongly suspecting that at any time I was going to get drenched.Here, on Whitworth Street, the rain had begun to fall. But the storm was lenient; just this one shower, then it passed on, to go drench some other part of the world.
As the day wore on, what had started out as ‘close’ weather became downright ‘muggy’ until negotiating the outside world became like wading through treacle. Finally, the storm broke and we got some much-needed rain. It was one of those days at work where I just didn’t really have time to take a decent photo, and anyway, evenings have largely disappeared from this blog at the moment so let’s use this one (in fact this is the latest picture in a day since 9th March). We can call it ‘Storm Study (blue and yellow)’, if you like.
The good weather broke, to some extent, although there was not the rain that the gathering clouds and rumbles of thunder promised. Dramatic-looking skies though. This was the last sighting of the sun today.
Being 42 