In praise of… a dark and stormy night

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/20/in-praise-of-dark-stormy-night

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The sentence with which Charles M Schulz's Snoopy began his novel was a joke against cliches, but, as this past weekend has illustrated in glorious sound and fury, extremes of weather can be majestic events. Little in our experience can match the random exactness of a scene lit in fleeting but sharp detail by a flash of lightning, so brief that it has the quality of a still picture, or the different drama of a distant white streak cutting out of the clouds to the vulnerable world beneath. The mixture of unpredictability and enormous noise can be terrifying or exhilarating or both, depending on age and romantic inclination.

The phrase has spawned a first-line contest in Lytton, a town named after Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote the original line in his novel Paul Clifford. His unimaginative opening continued: "the rain fell in torrents". Snoopy's version took things in a new creative direction with his masterly "Suddenly a shot rang out!"