Photo By Zephyris at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6453552

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, a week or so ago we had a massive hailstorm here in East Finchley – I was amazed at the sound of the hail on the windows, and just as it was finishing, our post man knocked on the door with a parcel. He was wearing shorts, as he does every day regardless of the weather, and he is also bald, so I asked him how he’d gotten on.

“The hailstones were bouncing off my head!” he said, “And I couldn’t resist it – I had to taste one”.

“What did it taste like?” I asked, impressed with his spirit of scientific inquiry.

“Very clean water!” he said.

But what are hailstones? I realised that I wasn’t sure, and so I turned to Nature’s Calendar to see what Lulah Ellender had to say about the phenomenon. Hailstones are not frozen rain, but are frozen water droplets formed in the updrafts of thunderstorms. They are bounced about, gathering more and more ice, until they become too heavy to stay airborne and come crashing to the earth. A swathe of up to a hundred miles wide can be battered by them.

They are also very variable in size – the ones that I saw recently were about the size of a petit pois, but the largest recorded hailstone was about the size of a football. They usually fall to earth at between twenty and fifty miles per hour, but the largest can attain a velocity of over a hundred miles per hour.

And while the postman was unhurt by being caught in the middle of a hailstone, sadly this isn’t always the case: cricketball-sized hailstones killed 246 people in a storm in Moradabad, India in 1888, while a storm in Bangladesh in 1986 killed 40 people and injured 400.

Even at UK levels, hailstones can sting and bite, and who knows what changes are coming  as our climate warms? But for now, our postman can go about his business without needing a tin hat.

And see what you think of this poem by Kay Ryan. I think it captures the surprise and violence of a hailstorm very nicely.

Hailstorm
by Kay Ryan

Like a storm
of hornets, the
little white planets
layer and relayer
as they whip around
in their high orbits,
getting more and
more dense before
they crash against
our crust. A maelstrom
of ferocious little
fists and punches,
so hard to believe
once it’s past.

And then, usually, sunshine, and if you’re lucky, a rainbow…