Last week, we had a prediction of hot and sunny over the weekend followed by cooler, cloudier weather from Monday. What actually happened was hot and sunny Saturday, really hot Sunday (for Britain, that is – Australians would laugh their socks off at me calling 29 degrees C ‘hot’) and then a hot and clammy Monday. On Monday night, the Met Office issued its first ever warning of extreme weather, and everywhere I look there’s advice on how to cope with the heat.
Tuesday morning was hot and humid, and I lurked indoors in the cool writing my Nano project for a while before going outside to attack the weeds in the veg plot. The breeze was getting up by 1pm, and by 2.30 there was thunder and a dark haze to the north. We sat under cover and watched. First the cumulus clouds built up, the dark murk came in from the north and the thunder went on rumbling, more often now. Around 4pm, the rain came down suddenly and heavily. We missed out on the huge hailstones that fell a few miles away, and we had one very feeble flick of lightning and that was that. We love watching big thunderstorms and were hoping for a better show than that.
Seeing high temperatures and a months’ worth of rain falling in two hours described as ‘extreme’, I’m not sure what the weather in northern Europe can be described as. I was caught in an exceptionally heavy rainstorm in Germany once while driving my motorcycle to the Czech Republic and it was pretty spectacular. The road disappeared under water, the road markings were invisible in the splosh of rain on the water’s surface and the afternoon turned about as dark as twilight. In the middle of all that, the warning came up on my dash to let me know that my headlamp had failed. Right then, I wished to be back on my old Triumph. The headlamp blew every time I kept up a speed over seventy for any length of time and the indicators turned themselves to point downwards, but it never let me know that I was driving without lights on a road with heavy traffic and no speed limit. In the dark. And through what looked like a shallow river. By the time we reached the smart hotel we’d booked for the night, my excellent wet weather riding gear had failed. ‘Soaked to the skin’ was no exaggeration. I did apologise for dripping on their marble floor and offered to go back outside till I’d wrung out the worst of it, but the staff told me it was no problem. It took us all evening and all night to dry our clothes.
Seeing the havoc caused by flooding in Germany and Luxembourg and Belgium and the Netherlands, I’m grateful that I’ve never had to deal with a storm that turned my road into a river of sludge, destroyed my house and swept away my neighbours, my pets and my possessions. I hope I never have to.
Julia Chalkley 