Cloudscapes Again

I could spend days watching the clouds. I once went to an exhibition of Constable's cloud paintings and drawings, his meticulous observation of time and place and sky, his beautiful attempts to understand the background to his paintings. The valley here runs nearly east-west and we can see some astonishing cloudscapes during the day. Huge grey-bottomed white clouds on great, slow journeys with the wind, soft grey walls boiling up over the Welsh hills, ramparts of grey-white cloud looming over Shobdon hill in the late afternoon. The purest clouds look like white ink spurted into blue water, a clean edge and firm shape. I have taken to keeping a pair of sunglasses in the kitchen, which faces west, to cut the glare from the sky and reveal details, the better to catch these strange patterns of evening cloud over Wales, layer upon layer building great hills above the real hills of Radnor like echoes of the Cambrian mountains which once stood there. Sometimes the very tops are struck by the setting sun, a vivid slash of sharp golden light across the mountain peaks; and a moment later it is gone.