Thunder 'n' Lightning

Great Aunt (Bopa) Mary's little chair There’s a right-angled cloud up in the sky looking down at me as I sit at my desk by the window in the corner of what used to be (and occasionally still is) our dining room. Right-angled clouds appearing in the sky, what next, I ask? Perhaps it’s there in the sky as a precursor to the mega-storm we’ve been warned to expect in the UK sometime this afternoon. The treetops are somewhat billowy and there are ominously dark clouds fast approaching - I’m on my guard! Judith instucted me to be off the computer before the storm strikes - good sense, of course, and I shan’t disobey her. Judith is not a fan of thunder and lightning. She is of course not alone in this: my Great Aunt Mary at the first thundrous drum roll would immediately gather her favourite little chair and head for the cupboard under the stairs; my father, generally a sanguine type, used to turn quite pale and become unusually silent during thunder storms. He’d seek out a quiet spot in a dark room and sit the thing out.

Dad said he’d never been troubled by whatever the weather had thrown in his direction, until, in his early twenties, he’d experienced storms in the Himalayas. He was taken to Darjeeling to a nursing home to convalesce after first having undergone some weeks of hospitalisation and treatment for amoebic dysentery during World War Two. He was stationed on an RAF base in Mumbai (then Bombay), where he’d fallen prey to the ‘bug’. The treatment for this form of dysentery in those days required being filled-up with a pink foam that Dad said smelt like disinfectant. I shall spare you, gentle reader, a fuller description of exactly how a pink foam might wend its way along to find the small intestine of a British serviceman during WW2. Apparently, the treatment demanded that the foam had to be retained incrementally - initially for perhaps only fifteen minutes or so, gradually increasing to several hours. Dad always made me laugh when he described the joyous agony this experience could be at times. It’s not difficult to picture the scene - a ward full of bright-eyed young servicemen all attempting to retain the pink foam that had been inserted in their nether regions - the banter and waggish humour, and in the face of this, the Herculean effort required to avoid laughter and the bubbling gurgles that must inevitably follow any muscle relaxation.

Isn’t it strange where a right-angled cloud up in the sky can take you? Actually, in the time it’s taken to write this blog post the sky has totally cleared and it is now a gorgeous clear blue, not a storm cloud in sight - not even a pink bubble!