All Quiet on The Weather Front

It was raining very hard in the back garden.

The droplets were swollen and heavy and such was the volume and velocity of the sudden downpour that there appeared to be a continous curtain of water.

In the early evening sunlight, dodging between waves of black thunder cloud the sheen on the cascade was startlingly bright. It resembled an array of vertical gas filled tubes, fluorescent strip lights suspended in the saturated air .

There was the distant rumble and the sheet lightning flash of a rolling storm somewhere out beyond our postcode but the strangest thing was that it was not raining at all just around the house corner on the driveway or out on the street beyond..

A matter of a few feet only.

I verified this by running through to the bay window on the north side of the house.

The light conditions were exactly constant with those out back but it was otherwise perfectly dry and calm.

I was on the exact cusp of a weatherfront.

On the Meteorological Office reports at the end of the news the satellite photos, in real time, give an impression of the phenomena of a weather front but the line of cloud, as depicted, could be as broad as a whole county.

I had not really considered it before but logically there must be a defined position where you could stand with one hand in a rain shower and the other hand perfectly free from precipitation.

Today those exact conditions had been replicated.

There was no wind to deflect the raindrops from the sheer vertical. The cast iron gutters, corroded away at the corner of the kitchen, poured forth with the run off from slate roof, but again and strangely only from the south side slope.

I was now out in the open marvelling at the natural phenomena of that storm.

The north slope of the kitchen roof remained completely pale and dusty in the absence of any cleansing rain.

The downpour intensified for a few brief moments and then, as if on the set of a movie, it stopped abruptly.

In the aftermath of the sudden and concentrated deluge the air was electrically charged, crackling , cool and fresh. 

It was a marvellous but humbling experience.