Wednesday, August 24th, 11am. The storm is showing no signs of moving on. Since 8:30am we have had heavy rain, thunder and lightning, one lightning strike being so powerful that it has knocked out our electricity and mobile networks.
My bother-in-law sent me this text recently:
“The rain falls in the Northern mountains of Ethiopia. It joins the Blue Nile and eventually flows into Egypt. At the end of July /beginning of August each year the temperature is such that increased evaporation occurs and clouds form. These cross the Eastern Mediterranean triggering off storms across Italy the Balkans and Greece from the 15th August onwards. The feast of the Assumption is celebrated on this day on what was the pre-Christian festival marking the beginning of the end of summer.”
It might not be true every year, but the weather has been unstable since August 15th or 16th. I feel sorry for our Balkan tourists, who might be confined to barracks for the next few days because the bad weather is forecast to continue. Average salaries in Bulgaria and North Macedonia are even lower than in Greece, so the poor buggers are paying a lot to be stuck in their rooms. Of course, the weather is not good for bar and restaurant owners either as they cannot function without power or customers.
1pm and it is still raining steadily to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. Without electricity, it’s too dark to read a book so I’ve opened the fiddle case and drawn my weapon. I don’t like people hearing me when I’m practising new material, so I bought a practice mute recently. It certainly is effective. Here’s a photo of it sitting on the bridge with the concert mute sitting idly about 3cm behind it. Next month I will have to take the fiddle for a service.
The power came back on at 6:15pm. Now, as I write at 8:45pm, it is still raining though the thunder and lightning has moved on to torment some other region.
Finally, in my last post I said I would look at the Asia Minor disaster. I will leave it till next month as I want to do a little more research.