It’s one of my favourite things in the whole world. Sitting by a window at night time and watching flashes of lightning light up the sky, listening to the rumbles and crashes of thunder. It’s like watching a crackling fire or a heavy snow storm. It’s compelling viewing.

We don’t get many electrical storms where we live, that’s part of the appeal of them, and the ones we do get are short-lived. They appear out of nowhere, but with a day or two advanced warning, flash and crash a bit, and then disappear.

I have a couple of memorable storms, but nothing major. The time we were shaken awake in the night by a sudden crash of thunder directly above us. We had a cat at the time, Nonsense, and before the thunder clap had even finished, we heard the four tiny feet clambering up the stairs, felt a weight plod on to the bed, and a meeping bulge of white fluff muscled in between us.

One of my favourite storms was one that we saw on flight some years ago. I’m sure the pilot must have mentioned it, but it didn’t register at the time, and the plane diverted to the south. Unusually, we flew over Paris, and I recognised the French Capital by its distinct street layout. Despite the height and distance, the Eiffel Tower was clear, and was surrounded by tiny flashes of white light from the tourists’ cameras. If only I’d had my camera. More interesting though, were the flashes of light along the horizon. Flying about five miles up, the horizon covers several hundred miles, and every second or so, the distant sky was lit by a flash. I’d never seen lightning that way before, it was breathtakingly beautiful.

That brings me to the storm we had yesterday. I’ve never seen anything like it either, and we were forecast a lot of lightening.

As promised, the lightening started at 1am, though there were lots of flashes before then, but no sound of thunder. I wasn’t staying up deliberately to watch the storm, I was just having difficulty sleeping because of the warmth I suppose, but I did snooze off for a while. I awoke to the flashes in the sky, constant flashes, lighting up the room.

During a normal storm I would sit and wait for the flash and the thunder. Sometimes, you blink and you miss it, or it goes off in a different part of the sky. Sometimes, the flash lights up the sky from the back of Clougha Pike, creating a brief but dramitic silhouette of the enormous hill that overlooks the city of Lancaster.

This storm wasn’t normal. The flashes were coming from every direction, and every other second. It was frenetic, and I watched it for ten minutes from the window, and it showed no sign of letting up. A look at the weather map below shows exactly what was happening. It was blumin stormy.

After ten minutes of the lightening getting more intense, I decided to film it for a while.

Thirty minutes of constant flashes is more than enough for me, and I returned to bed at about 1:45am after getting bored, for the first time ever, by an electrical storm.

I took a while to drift off. The sound of thunder filling the room, and the constant flashes penetrating my closed eyes made it difficult to sleep, but not impossible.

The next morning, I uploaded one of the videos to Twitter, where I saw that one of my Twitter friends had uploaded a video of a tornado brushing the side of their house, and had had to spend their night in their storm shelter. All of a sudden, lightning seems even more boring.