Hail

While floods ravage southern China, it's still dry as hell up here... although this afternoon we had that rarity of rarities: a downpour. Didn't last long, but was accompanied by incredible winds and hail and, sod's law, we were caught in the middle of it. 

The girls had never seen hail before. Luckily, it wasn't as big as the one on the right (14cms across and weighing three-quarters of a kilo which fell somewhere in America in 1970), or as deadly as one in India in 1888 which reportedly killed 246 people, but we were buffeted good and proper.