... certainly as dark and stormy as anyone in the village could remember, even the really old people who did nothing but sit in the park playing backgammon and reminiscing about the old days, which had never seemed as dark and stormy. The fluffy, menacing clouds seemed to roll in across the sky like bouncers gliding across a sawdust-covered bar after one drink-fuelled red-neck bumps into another spilling beer over his cowboy boots, and would have scared the sun out of the sky if it had not already been night time. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning that made the children watching from out of the window behind a raised corner of their bedroom curtains recoil in fright and consider sidling off to their parents' room for comfort, before deciding that it would be a sissy thing to do. The children silently counted aloud the tense seconds before the thunder thundered around the valley and made them hide under their eiderdowns wishing that society wasn't quite so macho and that they could be sissies after all. Lightning struck again, not in the same place of course as that would be beyond all believable coincidence, but quite nearby, lighting up the road into town and revealing the dark figure of a rain-drenched man fighting against the wind, and losing badly as he, for the figure was unmistakably male, though quite out of shape and obviously unused to battling the elements of nature in this way, which made his presence there all the more intriguing, staggered past the disused post office and headed towards the brightest building in this small town, the bingo hall. The man was plunged back into relative darkness, the sound of his trudging through the muddy puddles drained out by the return of the thunder.