Weather superlatives

I've never seen rain like it!" - that's the line we get from neighbours and pals in and around Pinoso every time there's a big storm - and I've said before that the weather here is pretty extreme. The trouble with superlatives is that they leave you nowhere to exaggerate to.

Yesterday morning we were woken at around dawn by the thunder crashing and the lightning sparking. The power was off, the emergency lighting was on in the stairwell of our block of flats. Rain was seeping in through open windows. At around noon it was still raining but we thought a drive along the rain sodden coast would be amusing. Maggie's car, the Mitsubishi, never missed a beat as it splished and splashed through the streams running down the carriageways, waded through the lakes ponded back against sleeping policemen and picked a way through or around the banks of silt and rocks washed into the roads. It was still raining when we got back at about five in the afternoon. It was still raining as we went to bed and it is still raining this morning. Going for my newspaper a little while ago left me soaked to the skin as I had to wade across streets running with water and with waves surging around the parked cars and all those lumps and bumps of a city street. There were fountains shooting out of the overfull storm drains and cars throwing up huge plumes of spray as they hit pockets of deeper water. It isn't torrential but it's heavy and it's going on and on and on.

Apart from leaving our floors a bit grimy and giving me the "it's not worth the bother of mopping up till it stops raining" defence the flat is fine though listening to the news on the radio it isn't fine for lots of people.