OF all the clouds that cross our skies in a never-ending gallery of protean shapes and shifting dimensions, altostratus displays the least personality. A single, flat, off-white bloc of water droplets and ice particles, it will never summon the energy to release them as rain or snow. It is a featureless, life-sucking, contemptible, vaguely Stalinist cloud, depressingly familiar among the weather systems of northern Europe. And as a vast layer of altostratus hangs over London today, even Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society, can’t think of anything nice to say about it. “One of the many great things about clouds, ” he says, “is that they bring so much variety to the empty space above our heads. Blue skies are monotonous. But, of course, this kind of altostratus is quite tedious as well, in giving us almost nothing to look at. I can’t say it’s my favourite cloud.”
Neither can he say what his favourite cloud actually is “ooh, that’s an interesting question” but right off the top of his head, Pretor-Pinney suggests lenticularis, those strange formations created by air rising over mountains, which look like looming mushrooms, gigantic white lightbulbs, and occasionally alien spacecraft. This cloud and many others are documented, photographed, and rhapsodised in his new book The Cloudspotter’s Guide, the first official publication of The Cloud Appreciation Society which has existed since 2004 in the form of an award-winning website, and now has more than 3000 members in 35 countries.
Their gentle manifesto is printed inside the book: “We believe that clouds are nature’s poetry – their contemplation benefits the soul . . . live life with your head in the clouds.”
Our plan, then, was to spend this afternoon looking up at the sky, an activity Pretor-Pinney describes as “pointless and aimless and fantastic for that reason”. The top floor of his publisher’s office is a perfect place for it, with wall-sized windows and a clear view over the Telecom Tower, the London Eye, and away off into the horizon.
But altostratus, categorised in The Cloudspotter’s Guide as “the boring cloud”, has ruined everything, reminding me of a terrible pun my father used to make whenever I was in a sulk. “Well if that’s your altitude, ” he would say haughtily, “you can stay up there.” Pretor-Pinney thinks that days like this are the reason why “the British have developed a slightly unfair and negative attitude towards clouds”. “A lot of weather systems move west to east and hit the UK quite early on, which makes our conditions unpredictable.
That can be seen as a positive thing, but it does mean you can’t really plan for anything, picnics or whatever, without the chance of it clouding over.” Compare this wariness, as he does in his book, to the way that Iranians pray for rain, which comes as a blessing in a dry country where particularly lucky or happy people are traditionally told:
“Your sky is always filled with clouds.” The author himself would seem to be just such a person, and he is delighted to imagine aloud the kinds of clouds we might see if the conditions were right. “If we were looking for great shapes, ” says Pretor-Pinney, “then we would want cumulus clouds in an unstable atmosphere, with a lot of vertical movement, a lot of building and changing. We would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see some shapes in those clouds?’ and suddenly they would start appearing to us. “Or if there was a cirrostratus layer, a hazy sky with a very high layer of ice crystals, we might see all sorts of optical effects known as ‘halo phenomena’. The crystals act as little prisms for the light, creating sun dogs two bright spots that look like mock suns or a circumzenithal arc, which is like an inverted rainbow directly overhead, like a sort of cloud-smile.” Pretor-Pinney is not a meteorologist, although The Cloudspotter’s Guide is packed with information, explaining the geophysical specifics of how each type of cloud is formed, and the scientific origins of their study.
The clouds were first given their beautiful but slightly off-putting Latin names in 1802 by the Quaker cloudspotter Luke Howard, who proposed the same “linnean” system of classification which was used to label animal species. It was made official at the Paris International Meteorological Conference in 1896 which went down in history as “the year of the cloud” when the original cloud atlas was drawn up, giving each formation a title and a number according to its altitude. For example, cumulonimbus which carries thunderstorms more powerful than atom bombs, lightning bolts hotter than the sun, and builds to maximum heights of more than 45,000 feet was designated number nine. So cloud nine is not, in fact, a place you would ever want to be.
(In an incident recounted in The Cloudspotter’s Guide, US Air Force pilot William Rankin was forced to eject from his fighter jet after a malfunction in 1959, plummeting right through the upper anvil of a cumulonimbus and later describing the interior of the cloud as “nature’s bedlam . . . an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics”. ) Pretor-Pinney, for his part, doesn’t think it’s any more important to know a cumulus congestus when you see one than it is to simply sit and watch as that cloud comes to resemble “King Kong holding an icecream cone”.
“Which is, I think, an equally valid way of looking at the sky.” He’s not a philosopher either, although he has a degree in the subject from Oxford, and tends to sound pretty Zen in describing his favourite pastime as a kind of “meteorological meditation”. He is, in the end, just an enthusiast, and he’s hardly the first or the only one.
The Cloudspotter’s Guide is, among other things, a history of our religious, painterly, and poetical fixations on the clouds. Pretor-Pinney has compiled great anecdotes and observations in the process, from Sanskrit creation myths which interpreted the clouds as shape-shifting, life-giving spirit-elephants, to the work of Alfred Stieglitz, whose oddly emotional cloud pictures of the 1920s first made a case for photography as a valid form of abstract art. But today he describes his own interest with a quote from Clouds, the ancient play by Aristophanes.
“He called clouds ‘the patron goddesses of idle fellows’. So there you go.” Our thought-processes, he believes, develop an affinity with clouds during infancy. “You’re being wheeled around in your buggy, ” says PretorPinney, “and staring up at the sky all the time. I think maybe something happens in that period which gives babies some fundamental connection with the clouds. A bit later on, when you start talking, you want to know exactly what they are, what they’re made of, and whether you can sit on them.” He remembers watching sunbeams shine through them as a four-year-old on his way to school those holy shafts of light, he now knows, are called “crepuscular rays” and telling his mother that it looked like “silent thunder”.
“Which she later told me sounded so infeasably poetic that she actually wrote it down.” Vocabulary aside, perhaps, little Gavin was no different from most kids his age the artworks on the walls of most junior classrooms are extensively scattered with little fluffy cumulus clouds which are, after all, very easy to draw. At some point, however, almost everybody grows up, loses interest, and turns their attention to ground level.
“Only children seem to have the time, imagination, or inclination to look up.
Without wanting to sound like Michael Jackson, I think it’s really important that we hold on to that very simple sense of perspective.” This is, as it turns out, relatively easy for Pretor-Pinney to say, having become the kind of adult who actually makes things of his whims and daydreams. Technically he is now a freelance journalist and graphic designer, but generally he’s a man who seems to pursue whatever interests him. After a conversation in a pub about the apparent illegality of absinthe, for example, he and some friends went out of their way to discover that distinctive liquid blend of poison and inspiration had only actually been banned in France for “antibohemian, anti-libertarian reasons which seemed wrong to us” and so began importing those notorious green bottles to the UK from the Czech Republic in the late 1990s. “We didn’t make nearly as much money as you might think, ” he says.
Pretor-Pinney is also co-founder and creative director of The Idler, a deceptively casual lifestyle magazine dedicated to “the importance of doing what you enjoy”.
“Which is not the same as doing nothing, ” he says. “You can actually put a lot of time and work into your preoccupations. They can actually become a way of earning, or at least augmenting your living. I suppose this cloud thing is a case in point.” When The Idler reached its 10th anniversary edition in 2003, Pretor-Pinney took a sabbatical and moved to Rome, where there are, of course, very few clouds in summer.
“I very quickly started to yearn for some variety in the sky. And even though there didn’t seem to be many clouds around, there were plenty in the paintings and the churches. Baroque Italian interiors tend to be replete with very soft, puffy-looking cumulus, because the artists wanted to give the saints comfortable furniture to sit on.
So I did a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, and clouds started to seem like something more than a personal amusement. Something bigger.” He found out how much bigger a year later, when he created The Cloud Appreciation Society out of thin air at the Port Eliot Literary Festival in Cornwall, “just so I would have an excuse to talk about them”, and hundreds of people signed up almost overnight.
“Most of them seemed relieved to know that they weren’t alone they’d been looking at clouds for years and all their friends were taking the piss out of them.” Members now send in so many pictures of sky that maintaining the website has become more a job than a hobby. They come from right across America, Europe, and Russia, from an especially prolific afficionado in Wales “I can’t keep up with all the photos he sends in” and from one solitary Kurdish member who monitors the clouds above northern Iraq. “He is very enthusiastic about the unifying aspect of cloud-appreciation, because obviously the sky doesn’t pay much heed to cultural or political boundaries.” It doesn’t take long to convince me to join, even though he isn’t really trying. “I have found that when you share your interests you become quite persuasive, and other people become interested. Which is how I got this book published in the end.”
Pretor-Pinney tells me all about the Morning Glory cloud, so named because of the elation it brings when rolling in over one tiny Australian town on a single white sky-wide wave of air every September. Glider pilots congregate to surf it they know it’s coming when a peculiar humidity makes the corners curl up on the plastic tables of the local cafe. Then, he shows me pictures of the hypnotically smooth and evil mammatus clouds that form on the undersides of American storms, the awesomely unlikely “fallstreak holes” created when supercooled water droplets collapse to leave perfect circles in the sky, and the nacreous clouds which can sometimes be seen high over Scotland at night, still glowing with the daylight and every colour of the spectrum.
Any one of these formations could make you believe, as the French philosopher Descartes did, that clouds might somehow explain “the causes of everything wonderful about Earth”. Finally, in the absence of anything so amazing to look at outside the window, we try to find esoteric shapes in a single photograph of one humble cumulus. “That, ” says Pretor-Pinney with confidence, “is an abominable snowman who is upset that his pet seahorse is ignoring him.” At first, I just humour him in deference to his experience and authority as a cloudspotter. But then the image shifts into place like a dream, and it is suddenly impossible to see that cloud any other way.
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