Monday, October 02, 2006

Downpours

We had some of the heaviest rain I've ever seen in London over the past few days, a dense downpour that woke me on Friday night and then a briefly biblical swirling storm of hail on Sunday afternoon. Unlike the tourists on the open decks of the boats of Catamaran Cruises the gulls knew it was coming and had all settled in tight little groups on the surface of the Thames minutes before the first crack of thunder. August used to end this way with a bang, but as Spring showed up less than punctually this year, so too Summer is finishing up about a month late.

343 years ago on September 29, Samuel Pepys wrote: "Then in the evening, towards night, it fell to thunder, lighten, and rain so violently that my house was all afloat, and I in all the rain up to the gutters, and there dabbled in the rain and wet half an hour, enough to have killed a man. "

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