Big Weather

That was cool.  We just had the edge of a huge thunderstorm pass over (from the look of things, the main part went right over the city centre) – loads of thunder and lightning, which lasted about half an hour, and then, just as the lightning was dying down, we heard a strange roaring in the distance which seemed to be getting closer. We couldn’t figure out what it was – it sounded almost like a train rushing towards us, but we’re miles away from any railway line.  And then we realised – it was hail.  Big hail.  We only got the very edge of the storm, so we only got a scattering of hailstone, but they were big ones – we could hear them crashing onto the roof, and breaking when they hit the concrete path (and the yell from our neighbour when one hit him when he went outside to see what was going on…).
I managed to retrieve a couple (actually, when I looked more closely at them, I think they might be two parts of a larger one that broke apart when it hit):

Definitely the biggest hailstones I’ve seen in real life!