Do Clouds Have Favourite Countries?

Some clouds visit Iceland with the regularity of a beloved aunt. Others hang around the Scottish Highlands the way teenagers hang around bus shelters. The Pacific Northwest has, frankly, a reputation.

Meteorologists will tell you, with admirable patience, that it's all to do with prevailing winds, mountain ranges, ocean currents, and the rotation of the planet. They are entirely correct. But it is also possible — purely speculatively — that clouds have preferences.

Maybe certain clouds like the way the light comes off the fjords. Maybe others have a soft spot for the particular flatness of the English afternoon. Somewhere out there, perhaps, a single cumulus has been quietly choosing the same valley in New Zealand for the last six hundred years, and nobody has thought to ask it why.