Rick's b.log - entry 2022/03/17

Weird sky

When I got home that afternoon, the sky was... well...

A weird sky, at about quarter past six in the evening.

It was possible to look directly at the sun. A taste of what midsummer might be like if Putin decides to see what happens if he prods The Big Red Button?
Only, don't touch the dust.

Speaking of which...

Hey, CLEAN ME!

So I cleaned my little car and... the next day...

At work the next day, at about 3pm.

The sky was sort of sepia toned on Tuesday. Come Wednesday it was more, well, urine coloured. The odd colouring of the room is nothing in the building, it's from the daylight.
It rained again in the evening, as I was driving home. Swish, swish, more gunk on the windscreen.
This time I simply parked out front, left the engine running, and hosed down the worst if it. I'll rewash it on, I dunno, the weekend?

It was sunny this evening, so I tidied up some cut branches and enjoyed seeing a proper sunset.

A sunset at last.

But why? Well, I see from the online newspapers that this has reached the UK after crossing Spain and France. It wasn't quite as bad as happened in 2017, but it was a lot more obvious because this time it rained so it made everything really mucky.
What it was, well, basically a fair amount of the Sahara ended up in the sky. Like, at around 2km in height. All those dust particles gave us the freaky orange/sepia/yellow/pee skies and those brought down in the rain gave us the dirty cars.

In Spain, it is known as a calima. When an intense burst of dusty wind forms during a regular sandstorm, it can cross over into Europe. Luckily for us in northern France (and the UK), it was just dirty rain and strange skies. Down on the southern coast in Spain, however, it would have been like climbing into a vacuum cleaner bag. Put those face masks right back on again! Down on the Costas, it wasn't so much a hint of what a nuclear winter might look like as a full on apocalypse scene, with the sky looking like it was either on fire or in the process of exploding. And good like looking at it without your eyes hurting like hell and your lungs reacting like the first time you encountered tobacco smoke.

Mars!

Thirty six lovely Mars bars!

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David Pilling, 18th March 2022, 03:31

Sahara dust sometimes gets here (North of England) but not this time. It got a mention on the weather forecast.    Mars "the return of the taste of legend" - did it go away. Have punters been saying "don't taste as good as they used to".    XL - like man size, are they as big as the ones we used to have, or has some strange inflation effect meant that the XL bar is now bite size.

Steve Drain, 18th March 2022, 18:53

"A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play!"    When I were a lad a Mars bar was 'enormous'. ;-)    I still have couple of Pelican books from the war with adverts for Mars suggesting you should cut them into slices to last longer.

Gavin Wraith, 19th March 2022, 16:06

Adverts in other languages, or from other times, can seem naked, stripped of the smoothness with which their creators have learned to bamboozle us. When I encounter an advert that I find particularly annoying or incomprehensible, I remind myself that its real meaning is just "Buy me! Buy me!" and that it is pointless to search for any other. Perhaps aware of this themselves, advertisers no doubt feel that any analysis of an advert, say for factual truth, is to miss the point.

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