I'm watching the clouds race across the field of vision I have within my windowpane. They are flying West to East faster than I have ever seen clouds fly before. They are racehorses, galloping at a million miles an hour, using the white-cliffed coast of England as a rail to guide them to their finishing line.

The wind up there must be terrific. Every ten seconds a new cloud appears above me and speeds towards the horizon, gone within a minute. Every cloud is different. Each one has a certain shape, and a certain density of water vapour to give it colour. Each one has a size and form that is so unique, and yet so fleeting.

If you were to take a picture of a scene with a cloud, and there was some guy with a weather satellite, with a picture of all the clouds in the world, he would be able to work out where you were in the world, just from matching the cloud in the picture to the clouds he could see from his satellite.

When we see the clouds in a Turner masterpiece, or some other ancient painting, we can be sure that that exact shape and form of cloud can never be repeated in nature again. That sometime in the 19th century the water vapour in that cloud fell victim to condensation and surface tension, enough to fall as rain and disperse itself back into the sea. That some lucky droplets will land on the soft down of a cat, or on the smooth thigh of a freespirited girl, while many others will splat into mud or manure, or congeal into stagnant ponds and puddles. The water lives forever, but the droplets, and the clouds, die in unheralded anoymity, their identities as lost and unremarked as fallen leaves.

When I think about my own place in the world, my own reason for being, I think about the clouds, how they are all the same in that they are composed of water vapour, how they all manage to be distinct without trying, and how something as innocent as a shower of rain can change the course of everything.