Yet how often have you thought that this might just be your lucky weekend?

Here are some other things you might not know about thunder and lightning:

Lightning occurs when tiny ice crystals collide with larger ice pellets within a cumulonimbus cloud. The positively charged ice crystals are lighter than the negatively charged pellets and they are carried high up into the cloud.

The charge separation builds up and up until in about 0.2 of a second there is a discharge of about one and a half million volts. The air surrounding the lightning is heated to about 30000 degrees Celsius. This causes the air to expand, producing a massive sound wave, or thunder.

Whilst light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second, sound is much slower at around 1,200 kilometres per hour. So when you see the flash of lightning, count. Every three seconds represent one kilometre distance from the storm.

Some people are terrified of lightning - that is known as keraunophobia, whilst a fear of thunder is brontophobia.

It would not be surprising if US Park Ranger Roy Sullivan suffered from those phobias. He was struck by lightning a total of seven times before his death in 1983.

At any one moment there are about 1,800 thunderstorms around the world with 100 lightning strikes per second. Java has more thunderstorms than anywhere else - around 220 days of thunder each year.

We are lucky here in the West County. We only get 5 to 10 days of thunder and lightning per year. So all you keraunophobes and brontophobes take heart, lightning is a fairly rare event.