Some readers may have difficulty in differentiating one Spice Girl from another. Melanie C and Melanie B are known as Sporty Spice and Scary Spice respectively; Victoria Adams is the Posh Spice who so famously married footballer David Beckham; Emma, presumably the youngest, is called Baby Spice; but the focus of our attention this is morning Ginger Spice, now known as Geri Haliwell.
Geri recently recorded, for the soundtrack of the film Bridget Jones's Diary, a catchy little number called It's Raining Men.
The song was originally performed some years ago by a group called The Weather Girls and all readers of this column, I feel sure, will know the lyrics: Humidity is rising, barometer's getting low; According to our sources, the street's the place to go. 'Cause tonight for the first time, just about half past ten, For the first time in history, it's gonna start rainin' men. Now, one might wonder if this phenomenon is really possible. Geri provides us with a theological explanation:
God bless Mother Nature, she's a single woman too; She took over heaven, and she did what she had to do.
She fought every Angel to re-arrange the sky,
So that each and every woman could find the perfect guy.
But meteorologically, the most likely mechanism is a whirlwind, or its bigger brother, the tornado.
There are many well documented occurrences of strange objects falling from the sky.
These unusual happenings are generally accepted to be the result of localised whirlwinds sucking up small objects in their path, which are suspended for some considerable time in powerful up-draughts before being deposited quite some distance away, very often in the course of a heavy, thundery shower. Frogs, small fish and quantities of hay are often mentioned. But sometimes, albeit very rarely, humans are involved. In June 1958 a woman was reputedly plucked through the window of her house by a tornado, and deposited safely 60 feet away. And a 1947 twister carried a male Texan some 70 yards through the air, before leaving him unharmed upon the ground. Even here in Ireland, in August, 1767, "about six o clock in the evening, as some gentlemen were sitting under a marquee in a field at Santry, they were surprised by a most violent gust of wind which lifted them with the tent, table, and glasses a considerable space off the ground by which the glasses were all broken and some of the company much hurt."
So perhaps the situation envisaged by Ms Haliwell's exuberant chorus is just about feasible, even if not on the scale suggested by the lyrics: It's raining men, Hallelujah; It's raining men, Amen.