Battening down the hatches

Growing up at the bottom of a valley in the North East tends to make you aware that, despite the best efforts of our industrialised, urbanised society to convince us otherwise, we are still, essentially, subject to the vagaries of weather and climate.

We are supposedly preparing for the worst storm ever to hit the UK, although as the BBC seems rather more insistent on this point than the Met Office, I remain sceptical. We should, here, be out of the worst of it anyway (the wee line on the weather map neatly bisects Berkshire) but nonethless, yesterday, I suggested buying a small camping gas ring, as it would be a sorry state of affairs indeed if the power went off and I couldn't have a cup of tea. Nik looked at me as if I was a bit mad, but I did it anyway.

It still looks very sunny, though, and if I've given up an afternoon of pottering around in the garden (it's full of comfrey AGAIN!!) because I didn't want to risk being halfway through turning the compost heap when the force 10 started for nothing, I will be most displeased.

It's very odd - part of me is relishing the prospect of a big storm, I always used to love power cuts and being snowed in and suchlike when I was younger, and part of me is utterly convinced it will be a pathetic Southern affair, where a couple of tiles get blown off a roof and the 24-hour news channels immediately commission half their staff to go over there and dig around for footage of distraught people sifting through the wreckage of their homes, in a manner reminiscent of London during the Blitz. I was trying to point out to Nik yesterday that storms on the magnitude of 1987 happen all the time up north and in Scotland and we just get on with it, nor does everything grind to a muffled halt when more than two flakes of snow fall in the same afternoon, but he just sort of blinked at me and looked a bit confused.