My father is already a celebrity in the Shrewsday cybersphere, so you may as well know he is a Renaissance man.

The term, coined by Leon Battista Alberti in fourteensomething, derives from that wonderful premise: that all humans are limitless in their ability to develop.

The sky, said Alberti, was the limit. One should not be boxed up and packed off as a scientist, or limited to simply being a musician: the disciplines overlapped, and merged, and in doing so gave the world a fresh, dewy perspective.

Of course one of the greatest examples of Renaissance man is Leonardo Da Vinci, whose little notebook I saw at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is part of the delightful higgledy piggledy hotch-potch of mediaeval miscellania that opened at the museum back in the Springtime.

Lydia and Sonja and I stumbled upon it quite by chance among the cathedral floor plans and illustrations for stonemasons. One look at it, dear Reader, and you would be entranced.

It is written in intricate, careful mirror writing from back to front. The tiny notebook could not be bigger than one of those half-size filofaxes, yet the delicacy of diagrams and their careful notation is breathtaking.

Above all, one gets a flavour, a sense, of a man whose passion for life and learning meant he followed wherever the wind took him, and was engrossed in each journey of discovery entirely.

My father has that same broad outlook, a wild enthusiasm and a capability for affable obsession.

Like his father before him, musicianship is a top priority, and he directed our church music for many years. He sketches and draws when the mood takes him. His notebooks overflow with poetry, but he is never averse to talking logarithms or formulae. Ask him a scientific question and you will get an engineer’s no-nonsense take on anything from the Big Bang to the periodic table.

But one of his greatest loves is Morse Code.

The story unfolds thus: a Boy’s Own kind of boy, he discovered crystal radios long before most of us were born, and spent his early teenage years constructing sets for his own satisfaction.

By the time he was 15, he was ready for transmission, but you need a license to do that: and to get the license he had to learn Morse Code.

And ever since, he has been a lightening-fast, quick-on-the-draw, save-the-Titanic morse coder.

I have so many recollections of waking to hear an unearthly dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-ing from a nearby room. When you change the frequency the pitch swoops up and down like some alien reading iambic pentameter. It is the ever-comforting sound of my father on his rig.

He ‘works’ people far and wide. Every day he talks to people in France, Eastern Europe and further afield in this strange, comfortable little community that converses in a dialect of dots and dashes.

And every day, he checks a certain website.

It is called http://www.solarcycle24.com. And it shows the sun as it dazzles its way through a cycle of some 10-12 years.

He’s looking, every day, for sunspots.

He tells me, as I call him up and dig unsubtly for material, that there are five sunspots visible on the sun today.

You can click on today’s sun image to make it bigger, apparently, and you get to see them in all their glory.

“One is just rotating into view”, he enthuses. “You can see it on the left hand side. Then there are two weenie ones there, and finally there are two whopping great big ones right in the middle of the sun, and they’re responsible for quite a lot of material.”

These sunspots: they affect his reception. But in a good way.

I think this is the story: short radio waves need the shell of gas, which surrounds the earth, to bounce against, to ricochet off.

It shoots away from earth, it bounces off the ionosphere, it shoots back to earth, it bounces off earth back towards the shell: and so on, zig zagging for tactical purposes, all round our illustrious globe. Thats how short radio waves travel.

Sunspots release stuff that makes the ionosphere more reflective.

So it’s an ill wind which blows no good: a sign of unimaginable solar conflict gives our communications wings.

There was no ill wind today, but there was a lowering black sky by the time I hitched Macaulay and guest-dog Clover to their leads. Clover has arrived to stay with us until Saturday.

We made it to the forest and I could smell the storm coming. It was that strange metallic smell-taste, a heady mix of forest floor and dust rising to meet some unidentifiable electrical force.

Moments later, the rain was thrashing down and I stood in the forest, aware that some of the great forces of nature were near at hand. A rumble of thunder rendered every other sound still, and the earth paused, in stasis. It was momentous.

One almost felt like somebody was trying to say something.

Such awe, storms inspire, and with good reason. For so few of us, even now, understand every nuance of what is going on during a thunderstorm.

That lightning, for instance. What a destructive scythe nature chose there: and yet evidence has come to light that the intense heat of lightning results in a process which ends up making vital food for plants across the globe.

Mary Shelley revered the power of electricity she observed in nature so greatly she wrote of how electricity could be harnessed to bring life to the lifeless.

When she was writing, wonder at the conflicts inherent in nature were at a high. To dare to harness conflict like this, and make it perform miracles: that was the ultimate achievement.

But with the wonder came the unease. Can we really dare to sit astride conflict and use it for our own ends? Mary Shelley thought not. Miracles would come back to haunt us, she seemed to conclude as her ambitious, obsessed doctor reaped the horrific consequences of his actions.

Sometimes, when one is in the teeth of human conflict, it is good to look up. To know that our battles are very small: because the sun is spouting radiation and storms rage across the earth.

And it is good to note that each of these huge global conflicts, born of nature, have a good end.

Surely if it happens in macrocosm, out there – might it not happen in microcosm, down here?