We are having a quiet worry about the predicted hurricane.
It is warm, and grey, and still here at the moment. Mark says this is very probably because of a bank of warm air being pushed in front of the storm as it spins and twirls its ominous way across the Atlantic.
It is due to appear in the Lakes on Monday, and given the vile weather we have been having recently, we are preparing for the worst. Just in case.
Mark has spent today on a ladder, borrowed from next door, in the garden fixing things.
He bolted the bit of loose guttering back on and made sure the log shed roofs were thoroughly screwed down.
Tomorrow he has got to go to the farm. We have got one generator in the shed, but he thinks he will bring the other one, along with the battery charger and batteries, so that if it all turns into a zombie apocalypse we will be all right for a few days at least. Also he needs his chainsaw.
We will need this in the taxi on Monday night. It is not at all nice to be out on a late night run and to discover on your way back that the woodland has crashed down into the road and you can’t get back. I know this because it has happened to me.
This was a horrible scary adventure a couple of years ago, when I took some drunk people back to Crosthwaite in a terrible storm after the nightclub closed. The trees were making a troubling creaky noise in the wind as I passed underneath them on the way out, but not on the way back because they had fallen over and were lying across the road.
I have known taxi drivers get trapped between two trees, as they have fallen on the road behind them and in front of them.
I have never known a tree fall on anybody. The odds of that are a bit remote and in any case you can hear it starting to happen. The problem is not danger, just really inconvenient nuisance, coupled with probably becoming miserably wet and cold.
There is a fairly good chance that this sort of thing will happen. The wet weather we have been having lately will have loosened the soil and tree roots will not be quite as tightly bedded down as they are when it is dry. If we actually get eighty-mile-an-hour winds then some of them will probably blow over.
This is not a disaster, because they make very handy firewood.
I will not be carrying a chainsaw. If I get trapped behind a fallen tree I will ring Mark to come and rescue me.
We think that we will be all right whatever happens. If the electricity goes off we can heat the water with the stove, and we have got two sorts of showers anyway, electric water heated and stove water heated. Mark has removed the irritating Safety Feature on the gas cooker so that we can light it now even if the electricity has gone off, and we have got the generator for everything else. If the gas and water go off we have got enough in the camper van to last us for four days, which is enough time either for somebody to fix it, or for us to get a gun and start shooting zombies.
All in all we think that we will probably be perfectly all right. In any case there are only two of us as the children are at school and the lodger has gone away for a week.
I will be disappointed now if it all blows itself out before it leaves Ireland, why should the Irish have all the fun?
I am at work now. It has been a good night. I have had the happy experience of adding a new remark to my private collection of stupid things that drunk people say in taxis.
“So the night club is over the top of the Ship Inn? Is that the Ship Inn that was there earlier on?”
That one, to my mind, is right up there with: “So what do you do for a living, then?”
Have a picture of the Library Gardens.
