Clouds in the making

This morning the sea offers us mist, and we watch some of it rising and becoming cloud.

This evening we’ve booked a raft trip into a marble mine inside a mountain. The guide on our bus trip there hasn’t changed her routine since the summer – she tells us we are travelling the extremely beautiful Atlantic Road and, um, well, if we wait for a car coming the other way its headlights will illuminate a bit of it for us. She takes us on a short scenic walk, pointing out the beautiful things we cannot see as we go. It’s all a bit surreal and good preparation for the marble mine tour to come.

We don hard hats, climb into big floating boxes and, accompanied by schmaltzy music, glide past coloured lights to a landing stage with chandeliers. Some of us are exchanging glances. By far the most interesting part of the tour is finding out how the mine business is diversifying now that the demand from the high-quality-paper industry for pulverised marble has dropped dramatically: the mine owners are marketing the caverns of the emptied out mountain – in one of which, to add to the bizarreness of the evening, they sit us down and serve us soup – as a naturally cool place for vast-scale data storage. It’s super-secure thanks to the 100m-plus solid rock roof, has endless cheap hydroelectricity and is an ideal place for your virtual cloud.

The day has come full circle.