See weather?

An unpredictable sort of day. It began with the unexpected tap on the door, exactly 24 hours before we were expecting the builder to arrive at 8am. I was completely unaware of this, having slept like the dead after reading far too late last night, but Himself was down in the kitchen making tea. The next three hours were filled with the clatter of a complex bit of scaffolding going up on our strangely-shaped gable end. They'll be back to clamber on it tomorrow ...

The rest of the day was really about weather. I thought it'd be raining, but in fact we had our coffee outside in hot sun. The torrents came later, just after lunch, accompanied by a great double crack of thunder. Rain sluiced down the windows and splashed in where I'd left them open. Would we ever get out? But then it seemed to abate, and suddenly the sun was out and it looked like another planet. And as I looked out of our bedroom window I could see a great plume of water above the flats down on the front. What on earth was going on? 

My main collage shows you. The absurdly suggestive alignment of firefighter and hose is an accident - I was taking photos from the car as we passed purely to satisfy my satiable curtiosity.* Apparently some of the roads leading down to the front from Argyll Street had flooded, and this was the water being hosed out into the sea. The second collage photo shows how the fireman thoughtfully scooshed it over our car as he waved us past.

And because the remains of the afternoon and the evening were actually rather lovely, I've added a further two photos. Benmore Gardens, where we walked more or less alone, was glorious - scents enlivened by the rain, brought to full strength by the sun - and the first photo was taken by the pond. The second is of the sunset sky to the east of us, with this amazing cloud lit by the setting sun. How I'm supposed to concentrate on the telly with this going on outside ...

As an antidote to all this nature stuff, there was a party going on in our neighbour's garden. I suspect someone had an 18th birthday; we'd heard the increasing noise (an especially asinine female laugh) while I was making dinner, and when we were eating it we suddenly saw a ball fly over the wall into our garden, followed by a youth, who grabbed the ball and returned the way he'd come. I hope my rose bushes were as fierce as they were yesterday. Later, when they did it again, I remonstrated with them from an upstairs window. They desisted. 

And so to bed ...†

*The Elephant's Child, from the Just So Stories by Kipling
† Samuel Pepys