It Rained....

We walked on Dornoch's superb sandy beach yesterday afternoon along with a few hardy families who, like us, were hoping for sunshine - and had it - but, unfortunately, the clouds....

....heaved up on a stiff northwesterly and it rained and it hailed and it blew even harder and it was generally pretty horrible for a few minutes.

It's a strange English sentence, 'It rained'. What rained? The weather, the cloud, the sky or, perhaps, fate? It's one of those odd uses of our language which is, because the weather is so important to us, extremely handy.

Anyway, Dornoch April rain is hard, cold and, because it crept up from behind and and threw bullets of hail at us, catching us waterproof-trouserless, very wet. Despite this, it was a lovely walk along miles of perfect sand marred only by the corpses of pink-footed geese washed up along the tideline.