I’VE been walking round all week with a crick in my neck all week, looking up at the sky in the hope of seeing a nacreous cloud.

It would appear that I am the only person in the North-East not to have spotted one of these beautifully iridescent “mother of pearl” clouds.

I learned this week that Microsoft has worked out that, because of the ubiquity of digital cameras, there were more photographs taken last year than in all the previous years put together. This year’s total will eclipse last year’s because everyone is taking pictures of nacreous clouds and posting them online or on our camera club page.

Except me.

Nacreous clouds are formed 70,000ft up in the stratosphere where the air – at least -80C – is usually too dry for clouds. But storms Gertrude and Henry have blown moisture up from the troposphere, where our weather usually hangs out, into the stratosphere, where it is so cold that ice crystals have immediately been created. When the rays of the sun are at the right, low angle at sunset and sunrise, they are refracted by the crystals to create the clouds.

Even though I have yet to see one, I have been consoled by the fact that I have learned a new, interesting word: nacreous. I had hoped that it would have some exotic derivation, but it’s root just seems to be the Latin word, nacara, which means “mother of pearl”.

The forecasters say that the conditions should be right for nacreous clouds until tomorrow, so I’m still wandering round looking up. In fact, I’ve been staring at the sky for so long, I am starting to see things: at every turn on Darlington’s inner ring road, I have spotted Spiderman. He’s just standing there, his mask covered with a black web, putting his thumb up at passing drivers, and waving a placard about the price of pizzas.

In a 15-minute journey around the ring road, I spotted him at four different locations. How he got from one to the other, I don’t know, but I wonder if he is related to these colourful sightings in the sky: Superman came from the planet Krypton; perhaps the pizza Spiderman has come from the nacreous clouds.

LAST week in this space, I somehow stumbled upon the origins of Fray Bentos and Oxo. “But what”, asks David Walsh in east Cleveland, “of the odd story of Bovril, that staple of frosty football terraces.”

It is odd indeed. Bovril was a South American beef extract invented in 1870 by John Lawson Johnston, a Scot living in Canada. Because his meaty product came from cattle, he began his brand name with the Latin word “bovis”, meaning ox.

But Johnston was greatly taken with the hottest book of the 1870s, a potboiler called The Coming Race, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It features a shadowy master-race, the Vril-Ya, who live deep inside the Earth and gain their masterful powers from an electromagnetic substance called Vril (just as Superman derives his from kryptonite).

So popular was the book that strange occult groups sprung up which believed in the existence of the Vril race.

Johnston added the “vril” to the Latin “bovis” to create the superhuman taste of Bovril.