The graupel-capped hills
The best writing on the Hillsborough inquests this week was undoubtedly by the Guardian’s sports news writer, David Conn.
Conn’s piece brilliantly detailed not just the inquest’s findings and evidence over the past two years – but also beautifully encapsulated, in very moving terms, the human tragedy of that awful day and the subsequent fight for justice by the affected families.
If you’ve not read it, you really should.
Listening to the radio on Tuesday in the aftermath of the inquest’s outcome, it was difficult not to get caught up in the emotion of the families of the 96.
To think that the authorities did their very best to cover up their wrongdoings and did it so effectively it’s taken this long for the truth to officially come out is frightening – a shameful indictment on how power operates in Britain.
Liverpool fans that day, like football supporters around the country in the 1970s and ’80s, were not treated like humans. The result of all that was needless death and no culpability.
One suspects that the end of the inquest is merely the beginning of a new fight for true justice for the Hillsborough families. THERE’S always something new to learn about the weather when you live in a place with as varied a climate as Britain.
This week, as winter tries to keep a grasp over us into May, I found out that the snow showers most of us have endured away from the hills and mountains wasn’t even snow at all.
It was a thing called graupel – a soft kind of hail which forms when microscopic snowflakes get covered in supercooled water particles, which themselves then freeze to form these very soft balls of ice which people confuse with snow.
The thing about this late cold spell in April, with its graupel showers and snow-peaked hills, is that it’ll make us all the more grateful for the warmth of summer, whenever that eventually begins.
Until then, we’ll just have to wear our woolly jumpers and get the umbrellas out if we want to spend an afternoon over the May bank holiday in the beer garden – remembering to keep an eye out for those graupel clouds.