It's a powerful thing, palpable in the room, like a sudden mass of threatening clouds.

As the threatening clouds approached, the winds suddenly blew up into a blinding snowstorm.

You'd have thought that the threatening clouds would impart a certain urgency to proceedings, but not a bit of it.

But as the ambulances screeched past beneath the threatening clouds, there was an exhilarating sense that today, at least, life was winning out over death.