If someone asked you how many types of clouds there were, what would your answer be?
My uncle, forever the erudite, would list clouds in their Latin names: cirrostratus, altostratus, stratocumulus; he might say something about the troposphere. My youngest daughter would ignore the question altogether and would quiz me on the lack of planes and helicopters in the sky.
But you might have, like me, a fascination for clouds. In fact, my blog stats tell me that much about you: the large majority of you live in London, so you do – you MUST have a fascination for clouds.
Here it is, my story of tropospheric metamorphoses.
In the Easter European home of my childhood, among the plethora of books hiding in every nook and cranny of our tiny flat, on the lowest shelf of the bookcase, if you bent right down, you could find the collection of art albums.
I was a solitary child. An only child for the first six years of my life (and detesting this life occurrence), I hid in the small, carpeted space between the bookcase and the record player. Winters were heavy and heating was sparse – we were living in one of the most known dictatorships of the late 1980s -, so that space, between the hard wood of old furniture, Beethoven’s vinyl and the cardboard covers of books, provided shelter and opened doors to imaginary worlds.
Top shelf: vinyl; bottom shelf: albums. I would take out a vinyl (a fairytale or some music) from the meticulously wrapped plastic sleeve (does anyone else also fold the corners of the sleeve?) and turn up the sound. I remembered the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by heart, but found consistent comfort in the art albums. Degas, Picasso and Matisse were great companions, but I was only 5 or 6, so what really took my fancy was a small album with paintings of clouds.
And here comes my cry for help and the coda of this story.
I seem to remember each page of that particular album: paintings of cotton-wool clouds, shiny grey enigmatic clouds, animal-shaped nebulae and cloud formations which hanged low, predicting storms.
I also remember the clouds were British. Its cover, grey, with shiny finishes.
I cannot remember the name of the painter, the year, the publisher, nor anything else.
This is the vaguest memory of all, and yet a memory of significance. Every time I look up, I superimpose images of the furtive clouds of my childhood on the troposphere of the day and the puzzle remains never-ending.
If you ever run into that album in the charity shop or at your local library, please return it to me and help me solve this mystery once and for all!
Oh, and a side note: I have not featured any charities on here for a while. My conviction that we should celebrate the charitable world more and on a lighter note is unrelented. I have simply been too busy IRL to bring that into action. I will soon be back with a vengeance to fight the charitable corner. Until then, check out #accountsthatcount and, whatever else you do, do it with joy!