As I continue to plummet inescapably towards middle age, I have found myself searching for the thing. The thing that all men develop at a certain age. At first this thing will merely be an interest, taken up to escape the drab tedium of day-to-day life. But, gradually and without warning, it will blossom into so much more than that. It will become their entire identity.
For some men this thing is golf. For others it's gardening or piano-playing. My dad's thing is fishing, which means he's doomed to only receive birthday cards with pictures of fish on them for the rest of his life. About 10 years ago he attempted to stage a feeble protest against this. "There's more to me than just fishing!" he wheezed, forlornly. "I'm a person too!" It didn't work. The following year someone gave him a cushion shaped like a fish. Like I said, he's doomed.
Anyway, I'm starting to worry that my thing might be amateur meteorology. Admittedly this is entirely based on a chance discovery of LightningMaps.org, a website that shows lightning strikes occurring in real time, but my interest in that alone has already developed into something bordering on dangerous obsession.
The site is basically just a modified Google Map that plops a dot in the exact location that lightning strikes, but I absolutely cannot tear myself away from it. In the past I would spend my free time watching television or being outside with friends. Not now, though. Now I sit in the same place all day, staring at LightningMaps on my phone and getting excited because it looks like a storm might be skirting the peripheries of Dartford.
During my working hours, I used to keep Twitter open in a separate window on my computer in order to maintain a vague connection with the outside world. Now, though, Twitter has been replaced with a flickering map of Europe. There's a cloudless sky outside as I write this, and yet for some reason I've still got LightningMaps open. As a result, I can tell you that Macedonia is currently being pummelled silly with lightning. For some reason, this is incredibly comforting to know.
The site is the perfect tool for anyone who, like me, likes to loosely cloak their inherent laziness in the delusion that they're actually quite intrepid. With LightningMaps, I can kid myself that I'm just like one of those storm chasers from the movie Twister, only instead of blindly hurtling across a field in an armoured Land Rover towards a tornado that's tearing houses from the ground, I'm watching a yellow dot pop up next to King's Lynn on a screen while I watch Countdown in my pants.
As with most male obsessions, LightningMaps has already transformed me into a total monomaniacal thunderbore. "There's a wave moving in from Bicester!" I'll squeal to nobody in particular with the unshakable authority of a born-again expert. On Sunday afternoon I excitedly yelled the words "Rumblings in Frome!" through the bathroom door at my girlfriend. You could argue that she didn't need, want or ask to know about what the weather was doing a hundred miles away. I would argue that the good people of Somerset might be cheered to discover that I'm keeping an eye on them.
However, in all honesty, meteorology is unlikely to become my thing on a long-term basis. This is for a number of reasons. First, as fun as LightningMaps initially appears to be, I think it might actively be ruining my enjoyment of storms. A thunderstorm used to be a magical, elusive event that would strike without warning and then disappear just as quickly. Now I can see that they pretty much just happen all the time. The storm in Macedonia has crossed into Bulgaria now, for instance, and one has just started in Lithuania. All this is really doing is making planet Earth's most magnificent display of strength look a bit mundane. But I suppose that's the internet for you. First it ruined sex, then it ruined magic and now it's ruining nature.
But mainly I think this is a passing infatuation because it's quite nice to have the illusion of control at the moment. The events in Gaza and Ukraine this week have been so uniformly grim, and their consequences so potentially dire, that you can't help feeling powerless in the face of it all. It would be easy to fall into a numb state of blank incomprehension at the horrors of the world. I've found that the best way around this is to pick something that's vaguely apocalyptic-looking but ultimately benign, like lightning, and watch it like a nervous, paranoid hawk to make sure it's not coming too close to where I live.
Hopefully I won't have to keep this up for long. Hopefully things will reach a stage of passive equilibrium again soon, and I can stop funnelling all my energy into an entertaining but pointless distraction. And, at that point, maybe I can start doing something constructive with my time. I hear fishing's nice.
