The autumn inevitably brought plenty of cloudy days, not to mention strong winds and rain, but at times the dark clouds had beautiful silver linings, and bright rays shone through them from beyond. When that happened, Algy just leaned back on the sand and gazed at the beautiful play of light which caused the whole sea to sparkle with diamonds…

Algy hopes that even on the dark days, your clouds will turn out to have silver linings, and rays of light will shine through to sparkle on you :-))

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It was supposed to be spring, but the sky was black, the air was cold, and there was very little sign of life about the place. So Algy perched on a rock beside the sleeping barnacles and limpets, and held on tight, just as they do. The wind was getting up, ruffling the tiny waves in the wrong direction as they tried to approach the shore, and Algy didn’t want to be blown into the sea by a sudden gust. He gazed at the water: some ripples went this way, some went that, and some seemed to go round in circles. Algy was fascinated by the complexity of the ever-changing patterns of motion and light, and for a while he became so absorbed in trying to watch it all that he quite forgot how cold he felt…

While Algy was absorbed in his book, with his beak tucked deep inside the pages, the sky above him got blacker and blacker, and the sharp east wind grew steadily stronger and colder. He looked up from his reading and realised that the weather was changing fast. As the sun cast rays out from behind the clouds it created beautiful patches of light on the sea, but Algy knew that it meant the end of sunny days for a while. That bitter wind was certainly beginning to whine, and the Marram grass was complaining too; it reminded Algy of a poem by Emily Dickinson:

          The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
          A travelling flake of snow
          Across a barn or through a rut
          Debates if it will go.

          A narrow wind complains all day
          How some one treated him;
          Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
          Without her diadem.

[Algy is quoting the poem The sky is low by the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson.]