On Roseberry this morning, a weld-built young chap, kitted out as if he had sprinted straight from a gym in Middlesbrough, greeted me with a cheery “Aarite, lad? Beautiful up ’ere today, init? Better than last Mondee, eh?”. His words rather floored me, not only for his unexpected use of “beautiful” but because I would need to rummage back through these posts to recall what on earth I was doing last Monday. And why the “lad” business, exactly? I am old enough to remember the demolition of Ayresome Park when his Dad was still collecting football cards.
Yet the real wonder was before us. Sunbeams spilled through a break in the patchy cloud, casting a bright shaft of light upon Ayton Banks Farm in Gribdale, as though the heavens had taken it upon themselves to single out the place for praise.
These so-called “God rays” seem to meet at the sun, though in truth they run as straight as any ruler, their apparent convergence nothing more than the old trick of perspective. Our ancestors, and no doubt a few of today’s more imaginative folk, believed these shifting bands of brightness were vapours sucked up by the sun, soon to become clouds and showers. The truth is far more modest: the beams reveal themselves only because of dust or tiny droplets in the air, rather like the shafts of light that catch one’s eye in a quietly neglected room.
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