Cloudscapes Again

Just now, a routine trip to the outbuildings and the hunt for a book, the clouds took me by surprise. Great towering thunderheads of boiling, slow motion clouds, dark lilac tinged with brilliant sunlit white, sharp like fountain-pen ink squirted into clean water, above the horizon a slash of razor light, huge and vivid. Manoeuvring their way out of Wales like a squadron of battleships. And over Shobdon hill, lit by the sun, a similar (never identical) gigantic tumbling of whites and greys, slow-moving, slow-changing, internally boiling mass of cloud. I find cloudscapes astonishing; I found recently some notes I had written about cloudscapes in cities and could gladly spend days here recording skies and clouds, as Constable did on Hampstead Heath. And by the time I have written this all will be changed out there, all the giant structures will have blown and shifted and changed beyond my recognition, an astonishing idea. I never did find the book.