Stormy.

I've been teaching all day which was good in that I was warm and earning money but I'm still not quite reconciled to getting up and leaving for work in the dark. But then I am rewarded by seeing the sunrise as I drive in. There were still quite a few children away, 9 from my class and some of the teachers were not feeling too good either. Much groaning in the staff-room! We did art again in the afternoon. This time they were making a simple figure of Red Riding Hood which they first stuck on and cut out of card so they could use a torch to see where the shadow would fall. Also to make it more interesting I gave them a selection of photos of girls'/women's faces so they could chose one to use as the face of their collage figure. I printed them from the web so I had to do a little censoring of the more revealing ladies who ended up in the bin before the children had a chance to get silly.

It has been wet and windy all day long and just at the end of the day Barnstaple was engulfed by a horrendous storm. Rain was lashing sideways across the windscreen and as I passed underneath a tree next to the school drive small branches were raining down. For the first part of my journey home there are some very large trees beside the road which I checked out first before driving quickly past them. Waiting at the hospital traffic lights a police car went by with its lights flashing and then a little way on they were blocking off the main road down to Muddiford. I'm guessing that either a tree has come down or that the river has flooded again. Then as I carried on towards Shirwell I got stuck in a long line of cars waiting for the temporary traffic lights to change. One side of the road has been closed off there because the hillside below it  fell away in a landslide. Normally those lights are very responsive to approaching traffic (unless something is coming the other way) but when it rains both ends get stuck on red. The tailback was getting longer and longer until one person braved the pouring rain to run up to the first car to tell the driver to drive through the red light. The first car can see through to the vehicles waiting in the opposite direction so it is not a dangerous manoeuvre if you drive slowly and make sure the waiting vehicles have noticed you. Once on the back road I escaped from under the cloud and the sky looked quite pretty. 

Looking due east from the our drive with the edge of the storm on the right.