New paintings and regular art updates.
A few months after our driest summer in years we are constantly getting wet weather gales and storms. The rain gets through holes and doen chimneys and overflowing guttering.
I want brilliant white clouds floating in azure blue skies. Sunlight on my head and shoulders. Soft breezes, not howling gales. Scents and smells that lift the spirits, not mould and fungus.
So, the spring will come again. I hope to enjoy the rest of winter and then greet spring with open arms.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for thunderstorms and lightning after they were forecast for us for the weekend, but apart from some heavy-ish rain tonight, which caused one of the cats to come in looking like a bedraggled wet otter, there hasn’t been much in the way of storms or anything else.
I do check the weather forecast online and noticed as each day came and went the rain symbols dwindled. But I also look at a website called blitzortung.org which shows real time thunderstorms and tracks them with detectors so you can virtually see lightning strikes within seconds of them happening. The strikes are also colour coded so you can see strikes from two hours ago in red, changing to orange and yellow for more recent ones and finally white for the last twenty minutes. So you can actually track where they have been and what direction they are heading in. I think it’s interesting.
I just looked at the UK which was blank. Then Europe where there seems to be a big storm over the toe of Italy. Then I looked at the overview map of the whole world and saw many storms scattered across North America. I hope they are providing much needed rain and are not as severe as the ones that caused major flooding recently.
Trees leaning over a lake. Perhaps they will fall if the ground becomes too wet or the wind blows too strongly. With global warming making the weather worse you can see how damage can increase.
Some efforts are being made to reduce the damage. In a few places there has been a reintroduction of beavers to lakes and rivers. It seems strange that an animal that actually fells trees could reduce flooding. But by building lodges (dams woven from tree branches that they live in) beavers slow the flow of water in rivers. The water pools behind them and so less water is released downstream. This can reduce the speed of water rising and so stop flooding.
So in some ways it’s good that the trees have been felled. But I guess the reintroduction has to be in a controlled way.
Just drawing in these colours gives me memories of sunny days at the seaside. If the colours were greys and turq, with some white added I would think of wild stormy days.
I remember a seaside holiday in the summer that was very grey and wet. The rain started as we arrived and took a taxi from the station to the chalet we were staying in. I was about eleven and I remember staring out of single glazed windows down a steep hill. I can’t remember a beach? I do remember mom having to put coins in a box on the back of a TV so we could watch it.w
Eventually the weather cleared up m I remember a harbour with lots of sailing boats. I think we went mackerel fishing but all my family got seasick except for me. The fishing lines kept catching fish and I pulled them in. When we got back the fisherman tried to give mom all the old fish but she insisted we got the ones I had caught. I don’t know what happened to them.
I also remember a hovercraft trip on a very choppy sea and eating egg and chips in a rough cafe. Funny what comes back when you see an image..
I looked out this morning and the wind was whistling down the hill and rain was pouring down. But we had it lightly, about eighty miles and further north of here, rivers have flooded and a couple of footbridges have been swept away. Then later today there was news of someone possibly being swept away by a river.
When I think about the buildings collapsing into flooded rivers in South Asia recently it just underlines how much rain is being dropped on the land in some places. Because the atmosphere is getting hotter it can hold more water which consequently precipitates in greater amounts when it does rain. Flooding events that were once in a decade or a century are becoming more frequent. We have to act. I don’t know about political slogans like ‘levelling up’ but I think the heavy rains are ‘levelling down’ and washing the ground away from humanities feet!
The rain kept off till about 4pm, then it started to pour down. There are lots of flood warnings with 30 to 50 millimeters of rain expected in the next 24 hours. Then there are seasonal high tides due aswell. Water levels are expected to peak in the North East and there is talk of an evacuation in one costal area. We are in the North Midlands and are expecting heavy rain. It’s certainly changed from the hot and humid weather of a week ago. I guess though that despite being under a huge cloud we are lucky. There is early snowfall in parts of America!
Mallaband-Brown