A Summer Pleasure...

... going outside at 1.40 am without feeling the need to slip a coat on. Britain is, after all, on the same latitude as southern Alaska, Labrador, and part of Siberia.

I'd heard the sound of banging over the top of YouTube, you see, and was curious to know it's source. It was thunder, so I turned off the computer and went to stand by the open door in case there was a show to see.

There was. I don't think I've ever seen an electric storm of quite such intensity.

For maybe three quarters of an hour the sky was lit every 1-3 seconds, and with each flash the tree in the corner of my ground jumped into stark silhouette, before disappearing again into the oblivion of darkness. Sometimes the flashes were so intense as to be temporarily blinding, and the thunder that came with them raised the incessant rumble to a deafening crescendo. It was classic thirties Universal Studios stuff. And in the middle of these pyrotechnics, Harry or Hermione Hedgehog (I still can't tell them apart) pottered past the potting shed. Quite surreal.

Then the rain came, while the show moved east.

I'm undecided whether I'm a Horace Femm or a Morgan.