Better at Sea.

A hurricane came a-visiting these fair shores today – Hurricane Ophelia by name. But of course, hurricanes are rarely classifiable as hurricanes once they’ve crossed the deep Atlantic because they’ve shrunk a bit by then and become merely storms. But today’s merely storm was particularly severe by all accounts, so let’s dignify it with the term ‘sub-hurricane.’

Ireland got the worst of it, which I sort of hoped might persuade the odd hardy soul to read my story When the Waves Call because it’s set on the west coast of Ireland in just such conditions. But I don’t suppose anybody did because it isn’t exactly famous, is it? (But note the clever link I put in because I’m good at that sort of thing.)

And it does prompt me to mention that I once spent time in a small frigate out in mid-Atlantic in the throes of such a storm. The effect it has on the deep ocean is quite remarkable, turning it into an ever moving mountain range of heaving brown water which lifts the ship onto a peak one minute, then drops it into a trough the next, while all the time the little vessel is pitching, rolling and yawing like Nijinsky on speed. It’s really quite thrilling as long as you’re not seasick (which I wasn’t) and as long as you don’t expend too much imaginative energy on the possibly deleterious consequences of such a situation. After all, you don’t get rescued when the nearest solid ground is 1,000 miles away.

In fact, we did have a man washed overboard on the first day when the storm was still but a strengthening gale, but he got rescued by a hardy boat’s crew of the bulldog breed and so, in the immortal words of Stanley Holloway, there were no wrecks and nobody drownded, in fact nothing to laugh at at all.

But back to the present. We in the middle of England are getting Ophelia’s flank tonight and the noise is not exactly thrilling, just irritating.