Friday 20th September

 Once again Thursday evening ran away with me. It was a pretty ordinary day, apart from the warm summery weather that allowed us to spend a good deal of the afternoon sitting out in the garden.

Thursday night is when I meet with a couple of very good friends for a zoom fellowship, church home group,  call it what you will. There isn't much time left to write a blog post before or afterwards, hence the missing Thursday posts.

Today we met up with another couple at a favourite cafe for coffee. 

It was a day full of surprises, beginning with being startled by a large, equally startled spider which had thought my shoes were a safe place to call home... BB trapped it and threw it into the garden.

The cafe doesn't open until 10. We discovered this after passing a car apparently stopped just before the entrance and swinging up the short drive to find the entrance gates padlocked; it was still 5 minutes before 10. We extricated ourselves and waited in a nearby farm gateway; so that's why the other car had stopped! In the following five minutes a queue of naybe ten cars formed up tidily behind the first car, and several arrived from the other direction. We might have been the second car to arrive, but we had to wait for our turn!

Our pleasant coffee together with friends was suddenly interrupted;

I never give too much attention to thunderstorm warning as they circle around our town without actually arriving.  Not so today!

The thunder thundered, the lightning lighteninged, the rain rained like a monsoon - I remember monsoons from when I lived in Indonesia as a teenager at it was just like that. The rain was bouncing up from the stone paving, and beginning to form a river running down to the fields.

Every so often a few walkers would appear with the water pouring off their clothes; it's only a short but pleasant walk across a few fields to the edge of the town... long enough to have set off in sunshine and arrive completely soaked!

We were fine, sitting under the substantial umbrella. The people inside the cafe kept looking out at us as though we were specimens in a zoo...

When we left about half an hour later the sun was shining, the chairs and tables drying off, the water more or less gone from the paving. It was as though we'd had the whole of a typical English autumn in one morning, and September's summer had returned.