Blowy Blighty.

We had a nice little storm over our sceptered isle today. News reports said that gusts reached nearly 100mph in some parts of the country, although I don’t think we had it quite that bad this far south.

The garden furniture and wheelie bins were scattered all over the shop, though, and at one point I saw a pane of glass fly past my office window and heard it smash on the path. That’s the third pane the greenhouse has lost this year. The birds were inconvenienced, too, because their favourite feeding place is the top of the compost bin, and the lid kept getting blown off. Fortunately, the storm abated sufficiently to allow feeding to recommence about an hour before birdie bed time.

The most worrisome part was hearing large bits of arboreal debris hitting the living room window with a succession of very loud bangs, but it survived. And the two short power cuts were brilliantly timed, one coming at lunchtime when I had food in the microwave, and the other about two hours later while I was working on a spreadsheet. Typical, eh? As luck would have it, the food was just about cooked and I’m an obsessive presser of ctrl-s while I’m working on spreadsheets. Oh, and one of the bird feeders was down when I went to collect it at dusk. I’ll have to sort that out tomorrow.

And this sort of thing is very educational, because it helps you realise just how awful it must be living in a place where they have hurricanes as a matter of course. I doubt they worry very much about wheelie bins or bird feeders.