We have extreme weather forecast, here, in the North. The worst storm since 1995 is predicted to peak at 2.00 am on Thursday. There is a shitload of stuff - galeforce winds, rain, blizzards and encroaching seas - a tidal surge. I wasn't here in 1995 but sat up all night through a really bad blow - 125 mph at times - in, I think, 2002, it was magnificently awful, we just had to sit it out.
The council has its flood teams out and is anticipating that one of the coastal towns will be seriously flooded, requiring evacuation. These times are a pain, I look around the courtyard and the near gardens, spotting, everywhere, hazards which could be uplifted and dashed through a window, humping them indoors, pots and trays and ornaments. I've been ill for months and let things go, a bit, well, I haven't, I've just been incapacitated by surgery and narcotised a lot of the time I haven't been near the big fuck-off truck since May, asked mrs i to go and fire it up in case we need to evacuate and the battery's flat. I have one of those brilliant new batterypack starter things, you know, the ones garages have, but even now the wind is blowing too strongly to lift the bonnet, the Citroen's in dock for a belt change and all we have in which to flee, if necessary - mrs i, Harris and I - is the Smartcar, not much room for survival stuff.
I don't anticipate that the sea will reach us, it is close, a hundred and fifty metres, maybe, most of it flat but there is a step-up of a metre or two to the house, so we should be alright, I mean, that's why the Vikings and then the Christians built here, we may well get some spray and some seaweed, the bottom garden may be swamped and the newly-planted thousand daffodil meadow destroyed, floated away, to Norway. There is a ten-foot, metre-thick dry stone wall around the bottom garden. but I doubt that it's tidal-surge-proof.
This is a double gabled house with a valley in the roof, the wind seems to find it's way through and around and over and the most that happens, usually, is that we lose a couple of slates, but if the roof goes, that's it, job done, the house'll be wrecked. We lost a conservatory in the last big one and if this one is worse than that we may well lose both of them. It's not the conservatories, so much - conservatories, Christ, it sounds like a stately home, it's not - it's the contents, the one has tools and tools and tools and tools and tools, cupboards full to bursting with polishes, stains, waxes, glues, fillers, sandpapers, pins, nails, screws, on and on and on, all of it labelled and sorted and shelved and hung and drawered; potions and powders, gifted me by the oldboys when I was a newboy, weird litle tools, punches and clamps and things for bevelling. I don't know what I'd do if I lost that lot. It's not the money, it's just that it's, in a way, my lifetime's summit, that collection of doingstuff. I know that I can go and put my hand on nearly anything I might ever need; being a man who can Do Things came late to me and it is a status I treasure.
We might be flooded out, we might be blown down, everything lost; shouting at each other through sheets of rain or snow, like in the movies. The snow here, in blizzard, is amazing, hits you like a burst from an angel's Tommy gun, not lethal but painful, at a hundred miles an hour; getting in and out of the car can be nigh on impossible, you can't hardly shoulder the door open against the wind and once open, the wind, in an instant, will fold it backwards against the wing, or even rip it off.
There will be power cuts, outages as we now, all men of the techie world, call them, but we are well-, even over-prepared for them, in every respect save electricity, one of these days, one of these days, I must sort-out some back-up, off-grid electricity, submarine batteries or something, Forgive me, therefore, should I not respond to anyone kind enough to comment, normal service will be resumed. It starts to blow now, vast and thrumming, like God doing heavy breathing; angry rain and sleet enfilade the windows with rapid fire, concentrated volleys of Nature's chilly musketballs; hark, the herald demons sing.
15 comments:
Oh Good Lord Mr Smith. Perhaps the prospect of a tidal surge is why you have a metre thick wall at the bottom of the garden? Someone built it after they lost all their tools? Hang on tight. Fingers crossed. Is the wind screaming yet? Fucking scary when the wind starts screaming.
Bon chance, Mr I.
In the bushfires here, the first thing people save is their pets. Good luck Mr Harris.
This is the first stop, the first high building, for winds arriving from the East so there is nothing for it to scream through, it's as much a weight as a noise, hard toi describe, ms lilith, you gotta be here.
Thanks mr mike, should be OK
Good luck with your living wall of fury against which no man can stand, if it doesn't kill you or wreck the place your readers will rejoice. Chin up lad!
Good luck and I hope everything stays put. I suppose that is why they used to build round houses which were at least half-buried in the earth, just a hat sticking up and little runnels between the chambers.
Good luck with the weather Mr Ishmael.
I have just lit a few joss sticks for you.
Best of luck Mr I. The weather. Another reason we left Fucking Scotland.
May you all be safe and stay warm.
You've been in me thoughts Mr. Ishmael.
When we lost a few irreplaceable things in a bit of a house fire we had once; when people were saying ..."ah well its only stuff... 'least you're all ok", I thought they were cunts.
Find myself thinking the same things here though! What else can be said?
Best wishes and take care Mr. Ishmael
tezza
The weather forecast appeared to say that things should have been alright! I hope so.
here in london at the cobra-coffee-morning, there are worries that the thames-barrier may not be fit-for-purpose, that someone with less scruples or sense-of-fair-play than the woolich jihadists may have planted a nike (or even a nuke) in the thames estuary funnel in order to give god's tidal-surge a helping hand over our puny silvertown sea-defences, or that a happy-go-lucky hacker may have programmed the barrier-computers to lower the gates at the height of the swell thus releasing a biblical anti-western deluge which would waste central-london and wash the city streets cleaner than any council contractor could ever dream - but fear not, because we have contingency plans in place to wedge boris's bum under tower-bridge as a back-up to bear the brunt of it.
sorry did i say 'bum'? i meant 'arse'.
...and may i say that this dread flood that currently assails our small island kingdom is as nought compared to the tsunami of tears that my cabinet and i are spraying-out like desperate political fire-fighters at the thought of voyaging to the heart of darkness to attend the really really black president's funeral in the very very deep south of very very black africa.
i just pray i can keep gushing for longer than old obama in the name of political correctness and to save both of my doughy faces - let's hope mr president's pet frog, hoglande, remembers to bring along a sack full of onions...
...if he's not too busy sticking his great big french beak into other parts of africa, that is.
I've already eulogised the great man, further on up the road.
As for the tidal barriers, I think that would drpwn too many important people, I think the wogs play the game of not killing the commanders lest they be killed themselves in retaliation. I wonder what really happened in the strange case of Osama bin skyscraper.
oh, righty-ho, i'll take a look.
twin-towers of speculation? look, if the average disgruntled school-kid in the usa can off a score or so students for prep, then imagine what happens when the country's two biggest mafia gangs fall-out in the senate? or someone high in the cia gets strategically bullied by his superiors or something? let's hope we don't get such big ideas here in this country - things are bad enough as it is. now, we're going to get an hs2-dyke thingy which will divide the chinese-ruled part of the uk from the usa bit, with london owned by the russians. god help us and all who shit on us.
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