I've seen sand flooding through city streets like a torrent of hot gravy drowning sprouts and beetroots, park benches and church rooves.

Or maybe more like the final sprinkle of salt over a roast dinner, baptising the parsnips and chicken breast in some sick meal time ritual.

It bursts through stained glass windows, suffocating the streets and preserving the locals. It rains down.

They used to mix it into a paste and mould it into city scapes - arches topped with fancy statues in humble salute through holes in the clouds.

Nowadays they melt it down and make office blocks out of the stuff, 500 metres in the air propped up like a million glossy middle fingers.

We collect samples of it from the moon, then analyse it and draw loads of numbers and pie charts.

We bake it into computer chips and pluck digits from the stars in the sky. We can predict eclipses and the dances of the planets with only slightly more accuracy than Ptolemy.

The power and strength of the sand is unstoppable. It'll come again when you least expect, and drag us with it into our own graves.