Cloudz
A very ruff guide to stuff in the sky

Tufted strands of moist forgetfullness, the clouds exist for a few seconds, a few precious minutes sometimes, or drag their soggy existence on for a handful of eternal hours, filling the sky with uniquely raw blobs of disturbance. They have asked no permission, they merely squat in the sky, make a mess, then vanish, untraceable but for the slushy mud they leave on your boots.

CumuloNumbus
Some days the clouds tower up from the mountains to beyond the ice-band, high into the statosphere, where their mushrooming enthusiasm and ebulliance earns them a mind-numbingly cold, slanted anvil ice-cap. They purr stupidly with th under and flash with lightning, boil with dark rains, and suck strong winds into their hungry maws. How majestic they seem, so hugely bloated, yet even they, the most powerful of all clouds, exist only for half a day at most. After stuffing themselves too full of moisture, they decay, falling into broken seracs of cold, sinking air, and rain. The thunderstorm is recogniseable by its short temper, a lack of friends and a loud voice. It's breath is reputed to be bad, though if you get that close, worse things will happen that overshadow the halitosis.

Cumuless
The smaller cloud may be remembered simply for the symmetry of its shape, and how it bobbed along, stealing for a few seconds the blue background of the sky, and making it white. It is, in fact, just a bit of sky that has been left out, and not a cloud a t all. The real cumuless clouds are blue. They frustrate photography.

Stratus
Long thin, worn-out blankets providing no warmth at all, also known as beggarman's bane. Stratus are on a journey, passing across the sky on the wings of a front, though they have no idea at all where they are going to. Smoothly folded clouds, with light from the setting sun glancing off their bodies, scattered and diffused into coral pinks, and apricots, and sti cky marmelades, with gold rims when the sun falls behind them, and a haze of light blue when they are high and the gold rim has fallen off. Such clouds surely form the beds upon which angels sleep, a soft cool resting place to peer down at the earth bel ow, drifting slowly by.

Missed
There is a kind of cloud which begins below your ankles, early in the morning before the sun rises. This cloud is the leftover dreamfabric which was not used during the night, and is unpainted, uncoloured by fantasy. Lying pure and white upon the ground , it waits for those who are sleeping to draw on its canvas the mysteries and dreams of their desires. It yearns to become castles and eagles and big-breasted baywatch lifeguards, to be coloured into dragonscales, and song , and wild rock 'n roll parties. But alas! the people arise, the cock crows, another day begins, and the cloud is left untouched in the hollows and dales of the land. And people called it missed, or mist, which it truly was.

Fog
Fog is another story altogether. Sailors throughout time have always consumed large quantities of liqour, especially the sailors who where at port before the invention of the sailing boat. Those early sailors solved the problem quite ingeniously by cons uming the port itself. Large quantities of it. You see, when the sailors are roaringly drunk, they don't think much at all, so the port, and the boats, and the ocean itself, lose their colour, and details become fuzzy, and eventually, everything vanishes in a haze. The fog thus created can last for days, or until the last bottle of port is found.

Rain
Most of the time the rain droplets in the cloud are bored to tears. They just float around and around, because the others said it would be a wonderful place to go, but now that they are here, there's nothing to see. Yet droplets pass them who have SEEN, and HEARD and played in SUNSHINE. The droplets become inspired again, and jostle for position, trying to make it to the top, or sides, or even the bottom of the cloud. But alas, it is a priviledged few who make it to the edge, and their time is brief, sparkling white in the sun, looking down the dizzying side of the vaulted cloud, down to the earth far, far below. And then the droplet is swept back into the cloud once more, back into the dull non-existence of passing time. Its heart cries out for the life of before, to be able to see, and live to such extremes of pleasure. Having tasted forbidden fruit, the rain droplets usually form a union and together they strike, lamenting in unity, until everything ends in tears. The body of the cloud then falls apart, and the droplets wander out into the sky. Each droplet gets one chance - to fly! They fall, twinkling in the sunlight, sparkling with joy, tumbling over end over end, linking with friends and then parting again, downwards, ever downwards. And the wind rushes past their stretched faces, and colours play across their surfaces, and down they fall, down, down, to where the dry earth. waits. Until SPLAT! all is revealed.