Simple pleasures
It had promised thunderstorms so I had packed my rain mac. I hadn’t needed it. From the Duomo cathedral, we took a short cut through Milan’s most exclusive shopping mall and found ourselves in an open piazza with La Scala on our left and the Bank of Italy ahead, the square buzzing with bright young things in designer clothing and mortgage inducing sunglasses.
Sunglasses of any sort were required in this blinding light and I dug mine from the bottom of my bag.
I like polarisation. You can see colours in windscreens and tinted windows and there is an unusual detail in the sky. Great when you have the time to spend standing and staring.
I looked up to see an astonishing cloud above us. It was a rain cloud, newly forming as the moist air was heading towards the Alps. The detail between the grey and white was quite marked. What was more amazing, however, was the rate at which it was growing. The cloud looked to be bubbling and boiling, the nucleation sites spreading just like growing crystals on an atmospheric scale.
I have seen many clouds before, one could argue ‘very many’ considering the geography of my childhood, but I have never noticed this phenomenon as marked before.
I pointed to it and my companions unanimously agreed with my astonishment. The cloud continued to expand. The three of us stood, in the centre of an Italian Piazza in the heat of the midday sun, not gazing at the architecture or the unfamiliar surroundings, or even people-watching the fashionable Milanese, but staring in awe as this billowing cloud exploded in front of our eyes.
Science geeks, one and all.