Maybe I’m the only one who can see, in this cloudscape, the figure of a kind of zooming, superhero Cloud Man, streaking across the sky with his blond hair flowing behind him in the wind. But as I can see it, that’s why I took the picture.
Rainbows are a kind of cheap shot, but they usually offer something — you at least know there will be colour, shadow and light all around somewhere. This was taken from inside, after I glimpsed the possibility while drifting off in the post-lunch death slot at the seminar I attended today. There’s a double rainbow visible if you look closely.
Incidentally, this is Alan Turing’s second memorial appearance on the blog after his statue made it back last year.
Wind is the hardest form of weather to capture on camera: this is my best effort at encapsulating what was, really, a very windy day, at least between dawn and about 2pm. The bins couldn’t hack it, they’re all down for the duration.
Joe is on his half-term holiday, so these two days I’m off work doing my part of the child care duties. And I decided to take him somewhere I liked. Why not.
Newspaper editors in London might also like to use this picture as evidence that today was not, despite their headlines, the day that the ‘Killer Storm Stopped Britain’. Or perhaps they were using ‘Britain’ as shorthand for ‘that small part of a decent-sized country which is nearest to London’ — as they so often do?
I’ve only ever seen this a couple of times before — a rainbow, or at least a spectrum, high in the air, nowhere near the ground and with no rain in sight. I guess it must be caused by light refracting through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Bad weather on the way perhaps. Let’s hope not: I intend to spend next weekend walking in Norway.
POSTSCRIPT: Have discovered this is something called a ‘circumzenithal arc’. They are not rare as such, but apparently only appear when the sun is at exactly the right angle to ice crystals in high-level clouds, and thus can be seen only in very restricted locations on the ground. So if you do see one, feel privileged – it may well only be visible in a space a few metres around you.
Can something be both colourful and gloomy at the same time? I think this rainbow manages it. I love the way the houses at the end, lit by the early morning sun, glow like little nuggets of gold at the end of the…. whatever, you know what I’m saying.
This is the worst thing I have had to post about on this blog.
Until 1.15pm today had been a very uneventful day. It then started raining: hard. Very, very hard.
By 2.15pm the road on which I live had become a river, and then we saw that the lane which goes into the woods was pouring out water (and stones). Whether it was just rainwater or whether, as some speculated, the old reservoir at the top of the woods had burst its banks, the normally placid mill stream turned into a torrent. Where it goes under the main Keighley Road and through a sluice pipe into the river, this backed up against the retaining wall to an astonishing degree, rising literally 15 feet in half an hour and eventually pouring through the gardens of the two houses nearest the bridge.
The owners of the house were not in. Myself and other neighbours tried to save vital items and – most importantly – the two dogs (which you have seen before on this blog). But most of the ground floors were taken out. Our house is uphill from the stream, so was fine (a couple of idiot drivers ploughing through the stream at 30mph being the main threat).
More photos and footage can be seen on YouTube and Facebook for those into their weather porn. For comparison, the lake you see in the woods at a couple of points is where we played mölkky the other day.
I’m supposed to be going to New Orleans tomorrow, by the way – but I ain’t promising anything. At the moment, Hebden Bridge is impassable to cars.
Being 42 