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The Cloudspotter's Guide

Sue Green

The Cloudspotter's Guide

by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Sceptre, HK$156

Cloudspotting conjures notions of an activity almost as nerdish as trainspotting, of people armed with pencils and dog-eared notebooks craning their eyes skywards, then annotating blob-like sketches.

But nothing could be further from the intent and content of Gavin Pretor-Pinney's captivating book, rejected by 28 publishers before becoming an unexpected best-seller.

Almost two years ago, the cloud-obsessed Pretor-Pinney gave a talk at a literary festival in Cornwall and launched the Cloud Appreciation Society (www.cloudappreciationsociety.org), which pledges to fight 'blue sky thinking' wherever it's found. Proving, if proof were needed, that however bizarre one's interest someone out there shares it, the society now has 4,000 members.

This book is the society's first publication and, as its runaway sales figures attest, is proving to be the kind of 'who'd buy that?' niche-market offering that charms all those who encounter it and enjoys burgeoning word-of-mouth popularity.

The centre pages feature 11 full colour photographs and a question about each, to be studied 'after reading this guide from cover to cover and notching up many hours of carefree cloud gazing'. Answer the challenging questions, such as identifying one of two types of halo phenomena, to pass the society's Cloudspotting Diploma ('it will guarantee a nebulous sense of achievement'). Or simply look up the answers.

That is indicative of Pretor-Pinney's style - although a self-confessed cloud nerd, he takes neither himself nor his subject too seriously. So, what could be a dry and academic snore is a lively explanation and defence of 'our fluffy friends'. Pretor-Pinney may have his head in the clouds, but his style is down to earth and his knowledge of his subject and his research, meticulously indexed and footnoted, is impressive and surprisingly involving.

The Cloudspotter's Guide, which begins with the society's manifesto - 'we believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them' - plus the Cloud Classification Table and Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cloud, is divided into chapters according to cloud types: cumulus, stratus, cirrus and so on. Each is a blend of science in laymen's language, fascinating cloud trivia - the water droplets in a medium-sized cumulus weigh as much as about 80 elephants - diagrams and illustrations, plus everything from historical anecdotes to poetry and art history.

Pretor-Pinney's own anecdotes are among the most entertaining, including his account of a 5am visit to the Billingsgate fish market in an effort to discover just what kind of mackerel a mackerel sky looks like.

And of course for everyone who has ever looked up and seen anything from a hippopotamus to Elvis in the clouds, there are tips on seeing shapes in clouds (relax, don't force it) and thought-provoking comments about looking and seeing and the nature of beauty.

Pretor-Pinney is undoubtedly obsessed and eccentric - this is a man who speculates that troubled 1950s pop star Frankie Lyman might not have ended up dead of a heroin overdose at 26 if someone had explained the answer to his musical question, 'Why does the rain fall from up above?'

But in explaining clouds' stories as well as their mechanics to those who look into the sky and see only the possibility of rain, he reveals himself to be not only a man in thrall to an unlikely subject, one he recalls first noticing at age four, from the back of his mother's Mini on the way to school. He also, through the unlikely medium of a cloudy sky, can teach us something about ourselves and our ways of seeing.

As Constable, whom he calls Britain's best cloud painter, put it: 'We see nothing truly until we understand.'

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