Category: Weather

Saturday Lunch

Happy Independence/United Nations Day everyone!
Storm Austen is coming at us from the south and Storm Boelo from the north so we had our family lunch of baked potatoes, eggs and salads followed by plum cobbler before the roaring winds and pouring rain arrived in both directions. Hatches are staying battened down for the foreseeable but meanwhile we scored 9 on the GSQ, reducing our average to exactly 10.
A1 is reading Precipice by Robert Harris, about the relationship between socialite Venetia Stanley and PM Herbert Asquith in the run-up to WW1. Contains many letters from HA to VS, all of which are, astonishingly, genuine. Fun fact: the author is married to the sister of Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and others.
A2 is appropriately reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves.

Hell of a Sky

The sky lights up as the sun goes down.
A1 is reading Eden Falls by Vaseem Khan, who joins Abir Mukherjee and Ajay Chowdhury as South Asian UK-based crime writers turning their hand to (mostly US-based) thrillers. With mediocre results, it must be said. This one veers into technothriller/science fictional territory with a mysterious alien object crash-landing in the desert, and the efforts of a pair of ill-matched women to hunt it down, while being chased by the FBI, an Elon Musk figure and an Indian intelligence agent.
A2 is reading Land by Maggie O’Farrell; a historical Irish family saga with plenty of misery, starting slowly but galloping to a reasonably happy end.

Take a Bow

A nice double bow, captured by the webcam.
A1 is reading The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves. A2 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which is what Graham Greene would have called an “entertainment” and was indeed very entertaining with its irresistible-to-women protagonist and its mixture of nostalgia and espionage; it was rather too much like the William Boyd trilogy in those respects so I regret reading it immediately afterwards.

Clouds in Raindrops and a Super Supernova

The clouds have now blown away and the Dwarf Mini is out observing a supernova in a distant galaxy.
Later: And the results are in! I first photographed this galaxy (C 30, known as the “Deer Lick group”, bizarrely) a couple of weeks back on 21 August. In early September there came news of a supernova, so on the first clearish night for ages I had another go. Clouds moved in so there there were fewer exposures this time (hence some of the fainter stars don’t appear), but the supernova — designated SN 2026aaiv — is clearly visible. A supernova is an extremely energetic explosion that happens when a star reaches the end of its life, and can briefly outshine a whole galaxy of billions of stars. Luckily this one is about 45 million light years away.
In preparation for reading Cold Sunset by William Boyd, A2 is rereading the rest of the trilogy (so far), starting with Gabriel’s Moon. A1 is reading The Lost Women by Tim Weaver.

Crescent Sun

The weather stayed clear for the eclipse yesterday. Here’s the traditional colander shot, awkwardly taken because it was difficult to hold a camera and a colander at the same time and there was only a tiny bit of unshadowed wall to project on:

And here’s a montage of images from the Dwarf Mini and a first stab at a video, 2 hours in 20 seconds:

Later we watched a small selection of Perseid meteors. A great day!
And today is our warmest day of the year: 34.1°C
A1 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee, which had lots of horrible people being horrible to each other and swearing a lot. Disappointing — like his mate Vaseem Khan he should stick to historical crime novels.
A2’s toilet tome is Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Delete your Facebook account NOW!

Passion Flowers

This plant continues to flourish in its tiny pot, bearing hundreds of fruits and overtopping the wall.
July 2026 was just above averagely warm but it was our sunniest July ever: 271.107kWh and our third sunniest month since our records began. It was also our driest month of all time at 0.6mm, though the accolade on our weather records will always go to the 0.3mm of May 2025 when it rained plenty but our weather station was out of action.
A2 is reading The Burning Tide by William Shaw.

Web Surfing

A very warm and humid day (31.9°C) to start the heatwave, so we opened the windows in the bedroom. It was gusty, and down came a very impressive cobweb.
Here’s the Met Office forecast for the next couple of days. It’s not often we get red temperatures (max over 25°C) at midnight, and it looks like tonight might be tropical — which is when the temperature stays above 20°C.

Gold at the End of the Rainbow

Woke up this morning, sun shining through the rain. Looked for the rainbow and instead saw, through the rain-blurred glass, what seemed to be a giant black and yellow bee sitting on a cornflower. Got a better look; it was a goldfinch eating the cornflower seeds. The rainbow arrived later. Here it is:
Meanwhile A1 is reading The Third Nero* by Lindsey Davis.

Phew, What a Scorcher

Our hottest ever day in May at 32.2°C, beating 32.0°C on 28 May 2012 (but that was with the old weather station, which over-read by 4 or 5 degrees in direct sunshine). Record-breaking throughout the country, too.
A2 is chilling out with a reread of The Darkness Knows by Arnaldur Indridason; a frozen corpse is discovered in a glacier. Cool.

May Flowers

The garden after an April which was middle-of-the-table warm and wet but the third sunniest, including five of our all-time sunniest April days and the earliest ever >12kWh event.
A2 is reading Desperate Undertaking* by Lindsey Davis, which was er um OK as thrillers about serial killers in ancient Rome go, but part of a series that would take too much effort to read all the way through.