Amazingness

Morna Road (6), London, SE5

It seemed like no time at all since I’d been gazing out into the darkness of the daytime, excited by hail noisily battering my windows, the whistling wind whipping up the trees, and lashing rain streaking sideways at a 45 degree angle from left to right.

But gradually I noticed it had grown quiet, and was beginning to get lighter. So out again I looked, and this marvellous sight I saw.

It somehow confounds my sense of gravity. The whole expanse of sky, almost totally full of thick, threatening grey cloud, which suddenly stops, low on the horizon, with a clearly delineated and totally straight horizontal line.

Of course all clouds are very heavy; they are made of water which is surprisingly weighty. In fact, the water droplets inside a medium-sized fluffy white cumulus cloud weigh about the same as eighty average elephants. Yet they float gently about, as if light as a feather.

But this grey cloud seems particularly solid and heavy, and it has such a well-defined edge, whilst the sky beneath appears so bright and weightless. What invisible forces are holding it in place?

At a very basic level, the formation and evolution of clouds is due to the invisible interplay between warm and cold air, atmospheric winds, atmospheric particles, and water vapour. All these things are in a constant state of flux. Indeed, it only took fifteen minutes before this grey cloud fluxed about to not only reveal more patches of bright blue, but fluffy white sections too, and my sense of gravity was restored.