Red Ophelia, Part II.

The days prior had been a kind of portent. Something in the wind. The weather got stranger, the clouds took on an unusual quality. The sepia air darkened. There were ‘rain gods’ walking the downs – those great, broad brushstrokes of cloudbursts that finger down from the sky, obliterating their portion of the view. Great summer-fat raindrops fell where there were no clouds above – and no summer; only a sort of uneasy, autumnal ochre haze – a ‘foxes wedding’.

At work, at school, a text from Mum: ‘Is it me? What’s happened to the sun?’ She’d been puzzling over a reflection from an industrial light in the canal – only it turned out to be the sun. The lights came on – and I went outside.

The atmosphere was weird and eclipse-like; except nobody had forecast this. The sun was an intense orangey-red ball, mostly too bright to look at, or marbled by cloud. It got darker still. People came out of school and their houses. The world looked like a sepia photograph – only one we were all living in. People rubbed their eyes, blinked at the strange miasma. Red kites went to roost and the rookery fell silent.

Imaginations went wild in the secondary school: there was talk of a ‘blood moon’ a zombie apocalypse, the end of the world. It was exciting, fun – with a real frisson of fear and wonder. Before long, the wild imaginations were overtaken (and complimented by) the scientists, the seekers of facts, of truths, curiosity and explanations. This midday sunset, this dark-as-dusk day was caused by Storm Ophelia, whirling up Saharan sand, ash and wildfire debris from Spain, from Portugal, and scattering shortwave blue-violet light, leaving us peering murkily through a longwave filter of red and orange.

As the afternoon wore on, we didn’t get used to it. The strange gleam reflected off cars like the sodium lamps we don’t have, out here in the sticks. It felt hot on our cheeks, on the napes of our necks, over our shoulders – making us turn round to marvel at it again. The familiar, golden yellow shafts of light falling on furniture thorough windows, gone noon, were a hot, fiery colour; were all wrong. And, there was a smell, wasn’t there? Of sulphur? Or eggs? Or bonfires?

What was astonishing – and life-affirming – about the day the sun turned red, and the sky yellow, was how it affected us all. How we talked about it, feared it, wondered about it. It brought us together in curiosity and awe: we are more animal than we know, more connected and excited about nature and the wild world than we realise. And there is hope in that, like a shaft of light coming down between storm clouds.