Hail

 A pleasantly warm summer day today, after overnight rain. Things were very different on this day in 1879, when a massive hailstorm, accompanied by incessant lightning, destroyed just about every glasshouse in the Thames valley. At Kew Gardens, some three thousand panes of glass were destroyed in the Temperate House, and seven hundred in Paxton's great Palm House. In total, the great hailstorm broke 38,649 panes along the length of the Thames valley, and the total weight of broken glass was computed as 18 tonnes. However, the 1879 storm was itself nothing like as serious as the hailstorm of August 2nd, 1846, when, in temperatures of 32 degrees C, hailstones smashed more than seven thousand panes of glass at the Houses of Parliament, three hundred at Old Scotland Yard and ten thousand in Leicester Square, as well as almost every pane of the Regent Street arcades, Somerset House, the Burlington Arcade and the picture gallery of Buckingham Palace, which was also flooded as the rain poured in. 
 Imagine the hysterical reaction if any of that happened today. The air would be thick with warnings of  impending apocalypse; there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and calls to repent our climate sins before the planet disappears under a mountain of hailstones. Back in the olden days, by contrast, they seem to have taken 'extreme weather events' (of which these hailstorms were by no means the worst) in their stride, putting it all down to that old unreliable, the English weather.