The bushfires in New South Wales

and Victoria sound almost as bad as they can get. I say "almost" only because, so far, it seems that nobody has lost their life. I think that is probably more good luck than anything else because the reports suggest that more than a few homes have been lost. 
Some of those fires have been started by arsonists. If caught  they should be locked away for life.
Other fires though have been started by lightning. The Senior Cat mentioned this to me after reading the report in the paper. 
    "Do you remember those dry lightning strikes we used to get in W....?" 
I do remember them. We would have the most extraordinary storms that would bring no rain at all. What they brought were "sheets" of lightning. The sky would be brilliantly lit with flash after flash of lightning. If you have never seen dry sheet lightning it is hard to explain how dramatic this is. 
    "What makes it like that sir?" I can remember one of the boys asking my father as we sat in the classroom trying to do arithmetic. The Senior Cat stopped trying to teach multiplication or division or fractions and explained about lightning and thunder and more.  The big brother of the very slow, retarded boy with muscular dystrophy had gone to make sure his brother was safely ensconced in the other classroom where my mother was teacher. (The MD boy would sometimes just wander off and sit outside. My mother was, without success, trying to teach him to read but he was almost 11 and in with the five to seven year old children.) His brother came back in as the Senior Cat was explaining how powerful lightning could be.
    "Yeah, the shelter just blew up."
He meant the structure on the side of the railway line where everything was left. There was an extraordinary honour system. People would have ordered things and they would come by train. There was no station as such but the train would stop briefly and things would be unloaded into a small tin shed a bit like an over-sized dog kennel. You went down and picked up your parcel yourself or the man in the post-office-cum-general-store would take it and you could pick it  up from the store.
Of course we all wanted to see what had happened. When the storm had passed the Senior Cat took us all down to see the shelter. Incredibly, although not in good shape, it was still just standing.
     "Just as well it was empty," someone said.
     "Yeah."
     "Me dad'll have ta' fix it."
     "Yeah and get my dad ta' help."
That evening we could hear the shelter being repaired because the railways wouldn't leave anything unless it was and the once a week train was due next day.
It wasn't until some days later that we found out that one of the goannas that lived along the track must have been in the shelter at the time. It had not survived.
Yes, I remember that lightning.