A wonderful electric storm blew through Batheaston at around 1am on the 18th of July.

Here's a 6 minute sound recording of it.  Heavy rain, and some rolling, crackling thunder.

Thunder Storm

A reading by Joshua Roberton of his short story May Day! May Day! First published on Associated Paraphernalia.

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"The heat comes screaming from the sky and strikes with searing impunity, a consistent and unbroken blue the transmitter, the waves invisible until they settle on the grass and on the play park, where they undulate like jet-engine vapour, and everyone wilts away into mute apathy beneath the profuse noon-day sweat that it brings.

Mad dogs and English men and women are all alike: they think it is their time to bask and to bark when the sun reaches its zenith, rather than seek out shade during those few hours that are truly blistering; and so to the observer, the collective metamorphosis from delicate winter-white to blotched-scarlet is an accelerated en masse phenomenon, akin to watching a televised nature study where stop-time footage of sporing amanita muscaria fungus silently blossoms into a transformative billow of white studded red flesh. And in two short hours much of the lolling, dumbfounded crowd is reduced to a state of dehydrated, sun-scorched delirium, where their sentences have become protracted strings of babble, and their eyes – bleached out, rolled back and misty white – are giving them no clue as to the rare shade of their skin. That stinging surprise will come later on, when they reach the dim sanctuary of home, and in their bathrooms the cool tiles will suck the procured heat from their raw pelts like the crude thermodynamics of a human refrigeration experiment."

May Day! May Day!

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