The Thai fishermen’s longboats had seen it all before and bobbed nonchalantly as the storms built and subsided on all sides, through the day and night.

On a completely different subject, last night I was a little weary and was trying to find excuses so that I didn’t have to mow the lawn. It was sunny, but there were dark clouds on the horizon. Perhaps if I waited long enough it would become too wet to mow? Finally I fired the lawnmower up and got to work on our small patch of grass that sits between the rebellious chickens* and the house. Soon, to borrow the immortal words of Monty in the immortal film, ‘Withnail and I‘,

‘The sky was beginning to bruise.’

The rain clouds were gathering and the first rumble of thunder drowned out the lawnmower. Then something odd happened. Or might have happened. The air became noticeably more humid, nothing odd in that as a thunderstorm approached, no the odd thing was that I thought I could detect a change in sound. It was definitely as though the acoustics of the garden had changed, as if the air was absorbing the sounds and echoes of the lawnmower engine. Deadening them. Can a sudden change in humidity do that? Answers from physicists and others on a postcard please.

* One of the reasons for my weariness was that my wife and I had spent about an hour that day, spread over a dozen unsuccessful attempts, trying to corral our chickens into their new house.