Saharapocalypse?

I’ve mentioned before that I like clouds, right? And sunsets? And odd meteorological phenomenon?
Wasn’t this evening the weirdest bloody thing we’ve seen in ages? For those of you that didn’t venture outside or lift your eyes from a screen long enough to notice what was happening, the sky turned a strange mix of pink, orange and yellow, there was hazy sunshine breaking through low-level cloud, and an eerie atmosphere like the tension you get before a really big storm. It got pretty dark pretty quickly and there was a general air of something being completely out-of-place. It reminded me of the way things were when we had that partial solar eclipse. Birds were confused and it was as if the air around you was oppressing you. But it wasn't scary, it was intriguing. I sat in the garden soaking up the oddness and when Philippa came home her car was covered in a weird fine russet dust. Her first words to me were “Before I get out of the car, just check an atomic bomb hasn’t gone off somewhere close. If this is nuclear fallout I’m staying in the car.”
We looked it up, and as you probably know by now, it was a result of a storm in North Africa that sucked sand up from the Sahara, then an unusual wind that brought it all the way up to Britain, and on the way it picked up some ash and shit from forest fires in southern Spain and Portugal. There also may or may not have been something in the Azores that contributed too, but it depends who you speak to. 
Whatever it was, I loved it, and coming on the back of a glorious weekend of late Summer weather and a Monday with temperatures in the 20s, this has made it one of the best mid-October 48-hour spells I’ve had it my life. 

RC 16-10-17