CUMULUS TIME

Lovely morning, a little on the chilly side but with only a light southwesterly breeze. The heavy rain clouds of yesterday have been replaced by more benevolent Cumulus clouds heaped upwards from a flat base like piles of massive lather drifting by at a leisurely pace. Despite the immensity of the mountainous skyscape, it leaves plenty of room for the good sun to shine.

As it appears, I’ve just taken a course on clouds, T.H. White’s well-illustrated four-page crash course for the observer of nature who likes to know their names and bearing upon the weather in his journal England have my Bones (1936).

“The Cirrus cloud,” White writes, “who lives at very high altitudes, in the neighbourhood of thirty thousand feet, can perhaps best be represented like this: (dashing off a bend zigzag line, m. n.). He is a fibrous cloud, a wispy stationary sort of mare’s tail: a bending, diverging or exploding ghost—something like a very old lady’s thin hair blown about, and suddenly frozen into immobility, remote and vague; a photograph of the smoke of artillery fire, a long time afterwards, fading away. He means dry weather.”

Unlike White, I’m not much for seeking out troublesome weather. I can’t for the world understand why one would trudge many miles through slush ice in the north of Scotland in late winter, spending a fortnight freezing one’s behind off in a succession of rains and gales in order to kill a couple of fishes. A most peculiar interest, I’d say, but it makes up for cosy reading.