It rained solidly all morning and into the early afternoon, and then quit when I was about ten minutes into a forty minute walk, wearing a long raincoat. By the time I got home I was melting, and so cross that I had to put the air fryer on for a late lunch of chips with garlic mayonnaise. I fear that the bathroom scales and I may be having a falling out tomorrow.
After spending far too much of the day on things I didn’t enjoy (chips and mayonnaise excepted) I was raging to be out having fun, and at 4pm I cracked and went off to Stratford, where the light was shocking but it was warm, and the Migrant Hawkers had also come out to play. The reed bed west of Lucy’s Mill Bridge had been almost flattened by the rain, and several Hawkers were hovering over the crushed vegetation, though in the gloomy light it was a bit tricky picking them out fast enough to get them in shot before they changed position. In a processed image this probably doesn’t look like top-class camouflage, but I promise you that in the real world it’s quite effective. I’ve chosen this shot because the dragon was flying high enough for the reeds to blur out, and I love that painterly swish of autumnal colours. In Europe this species is colloquially known as the Autumn Hawker, and I think this photo illustrates that quite nicely.
As turned off the Roman Road towards home a few drops of rain began to hit the car windscreen, and I was just congratulating myself on my excellent timing in getting back before it started to rain in earnest, when I came over the brow of the hill and realised that I could barely see the village. “What on earth…?” I said to the otherwise empty car, at the exact moment that I drove into a virtual wall of water. I was only four hundred metres from home at this point, but by the time I got there it was raining so hard that I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car, so I just parked it as close to the house as I could get it and sat there, watching the deluge bouncing off every visible surface. In the end R braved the hostile elephants with a large umbrella and sheltered me into the house, but the cloudburst continued for quite a while, overwhelming the gutters and falling straight off the edges of the roof in a watery curtain. With so much rain falling so quickly onto hard, parched ground, I expect there will probably be some localised flooding, but luckily for our village it didn’t happen here.
R: L2, C11, D14.
