Thunderstorm!

This afternoon I was dressed and ready to go to Nagoya's Oktoberfest, which like all good Oktoberfests takes place in July. I was totally ready to write a blog post complaining about overpriced beer and mediocre sauerkraut, as well as the slightly eerie square-shaped orderliness of Nagoya's parks. But it was not to be. Thunderstorms.

I've been in storms before, of course, but they followed certain mild-mannered British customs. Always keep thunder to, at its loudest, a discontented rumble, the kind you might make if you were considering writing a stern letter to the council. Give good warning with bouts of rain. Make sure everyone knows where things stand. I've never lived in a climate like this before, and it turns out I really don't know the local thunder god's etiquette.

Just before we walked outside, Nick checked the weather on his iPhone and mentioned the possibility of storms. Out the window I could see that the weather was dry, if you take 'dry' to mean 'moisture not visible in rain form, but instead pooling in the air and making your vest sticky'. Dry means no storms, right? iPhone's talking bollocks, mate. Off we go. 

The walk to the station was hopefully the closest I'll ever get to being in the apocalypse. Everything was silent, tense, and felt fundamentally wrong. We saw two people running home and decided to shrug it off. The sky felt foreboding and close, in the way I imagine it to feel when I read ancient Greek poetry - the wrong colour, lit by fires and crackling with the woes of petty gods. The thunder didn't even sound like British thunder, so we were almost convinced it was just some nearby rumbling from the warehouses, the kind that pepper the streets of Nagoya and appear to make nothing but bits of metal for fitting to other bits of metal.

About three blocks down I felt a drop - one drop - of rain on me. Nick felt nothing. There wasn't any spotting on the pavements. Maybe thirty seconds later a few drops more, and Nick asked if I wanted to abandon our plan and go home. The instant we turned around, the heavens opened. They opened like a trapdoor.

It felt pretty great, to be honest. We ran back through sidestreets in a kind of mad childlike way, not even really knowing if we were going an accurate way home, and there was a stupid indie-movie-ish joy in it. If there's rainfall of that magnitude you can't even attempt to avoid it. And the summer's so humid here you're basically wet all the time anyway. It's just a more honest type of wetness.

We scrambled under the porch of a block of flats and had a good laugh about the whole thing, sharing smiles and "cuh! eh?"-type looks with the nice ladies that lived there. I saw an ice-blue bolt of lightning. A slick of my hair stuck to the side of my face and made me look like a character from a sci-fi movie with an elegant curly face tattoo. And then two minutes later it was gone and everything was normal again and we were on our way to town (but with updated plans: instead of Oktoberfest we went to the quirky streets of Osu, to look at old games we can't understand or play on our consoles but still desperately want anyway).

I was going to finish this by saying how brief and tempestuous and mad the whole thing was, and how, in a way, isn't that a little bit like life, really? But then I realised how annoying and predictable that would be, so I'm going to take a sharp turn and say it was a bit like the short-lived reign of Tudor queen Lady Jane Grey, or the government of Gordon Brown or something instead. The thunder god has taught me it's good to keep people on their toes.

I wanted to post a video I took but it's pretty poor quality and doesn't seem to want to upload anyway, so here's a generic picture for you. In case you didn't know what lightning was.