Okay, I NEED to know how this happened. That is fucking amazing...
Comment by Pete Ashton on Friday 07 May 2004 at 00:03.
Two evenings this week, I have encountered strange weather whilst driving home from work. Tuesday was the most interesting.
Pulling out of the office car park, the sky was black, the rain was pouring and the sun was shining. An enormous, perfect rainbow was straight ahead. I crossed the roundabout, took the bridge over the motorway, looped round the second roundabout and sped down the slip road onto the motorway itself.
The rainbow was terminating in the road ahead of me. Cute, I thought, the rainbow is on the motorway. I kept driving, expecting the illusion to speed into the distance. It didn't. The rainbow approached.
Seconds later, I am driving into the base of a rainbow. This cannot be happening, surely? A rainbow is an optical phenomenon dependent upon the perspective of the observer, the angles between the rain and the rays of light. One can never encounter the rainbow, it's always in the distance.
But no, here I am, the crock of shit at the end of the lightwaves. The car enters the prismatic bands and I am bathed in iridescence. Then I'm past it and in the rear mirror there are crazy, dazzling, fragments of colour all over the road. Did I shatter it as I drove through?
It was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen, setting the tone for the rest of the journey home. Bright sunlight. Dark skies. Spray lashing the windscreen from the cars ahead. Brilliant blue sky, clouds, black sky, green fields, sunglasses, torrents, grey, purple, strobe, absolute, always.
It was - there is no other word for it - unearthly. Approaching home, I was not sure whose planet I was on any more. The sky hung heavy, lucid with diamonds. Rolling clouds of spume and phosphoresence connected the road with the horizon.
Here am I, driving in my tin can. Planet earth is new and there's nothing I can do...
Posted by Hg on Thursday 06 May 2004 at 22:27.
Received 9 comments so far.
Comments
I'm still reeling at the Beatles-based brilliance that is 'lucid with diamonds'...
Driving once the ends of a rainbow were either side of the road we were on and sped along with us...that was cool...
Pete - I'm still none the wiser. The only thing I can add is that my description, by necessity, makes it sound considerably neater and tidier than it actually was. I can't emphasise enough exactly how torrential the rain was and how limited visibility was. It's quite likely that I didn't drive through it at all, that it was just some kind of weird refraction effect from the windscreen, the glare from the road, another car's windscreen, etc. But that would be a crap story :-)
Stuart - well spotted. One day I'd love to write a post where every single sentence is inspired by, but not directly plagiarised from, song lyrics. I hope you appreciate the considerable restraint required on my part in not incorporating any element whatsoever from I Can Sing A Rainbow in this post.
Caroline - kneel and kiss the ring, baby.
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