It is jolly windy.
This surprised me in the end because by teatime I had quite decided that the hurricane was not going to turn up at all.
Like everybody else in Britain, we were surprised to wake up this morning to discover that the sky was zombie-apocalypse yellow. We lit a candle whilst we had our morning coffee and stared out of the window with a sort of pessimistic excitement.
Nothing happened.
We looked around quite thoroughly, but we were definitely still in Windermere.
There were no red-shoe clad feet sticking out from underneath the porch, and although the sky was yellow, the road most definitely was not.
In the end we got bored of waiting, and Mark went off to the farm to see if he could get his digger going, and I went upstairs to tidy the children’s bedrooms ready for half term.
They weren’t very messy, but of course we have had a junior lodger since the last time they were home, so sheets had to be changed and fresh towels supplied and the usual tedious process of wiping away dust and hoovering up dog hairs had to be applied.
This was dull. I had to make an effort of will to do it instead of doing something more interesting, which actually would have been pretty much anything else at all. In the end it was done, and I hoovered my way down the stairs with relief.
I looked excitedly out of the windows for the hurricane, but it didn’t happen.
In fact in the end the scary yellow sky cleared, and the sun came out.
It was so warm and bright that I considered hanging the washing in the garden, but didn’t, in case the hurricane arrived whilst I was doing something else and blew my knickers away before I noticed.
I was washing up when Kate turned up, so I thought it would be rude to do any more dusting or hoovering.
What a fortunate thing good manners can be. I was very pleased that I was such a polite person. I made a pot of tea and sat down to entertain my guest instead.
Kate told me all about hormonal teenage daughters and spending all her wages and I joined in with sympathy, there are some things that all women seem to have in common.
When Mark came back Kate went off home, and we went to bed.
This was because we needed an afternoon snooze, not because we are rediscovering our youth, just for the benefit of the smuttier-minded curious among you.
When we woke up it was going dark, and a bit of a blustery breeze was huffing along the back alley.
We went to work.
During the evening it started to be a bit windy. Leaves were blowing all over the place, swirling and scattering like a picture of autumn in an early reader book about A Year With Topsy And Tim.
By ten o’ clock the odd branch had started to come down, crashing into the road and smashing into splinters.
By midnight it was, actually, blowing a gale.
It is one o’ clock in the morning, and we have got our hurricane after all, better late than never.
I am sitting in my taxi outside the Stag’s Head, and I am being rocked about excitingly.
The wind is howling around me, making horrible whistling and groaning noises. I am parked underneath a tree, and I am beginning to wish that I wasn’t.
There was a pause there as I decided to remedy that situation. I am sure that the trees in the churchyard beside the Stag’s Head are good for another couple of hundred years really, but sometimes it is nicer not to be sitting underneath several tons of noisily creaking oak tree.
I have gone back to the other taxi rank, which is next to Costa Coffee. The only things here to blow over are the umbrellas, and they have already gone. They are lying defeatedly on the terrace, flapping helplessly in the bellowing wind.
We keep hearing bangs and crunches as the wind tears things away from their anchoring and hurls them to the ground. I am very glad that Mark repaired our gutters, otherwise I don’t think that we would have them any more.
It is an exciting hurricane in the end.
I wish I wasn’t such a shocking spendthrift.
I don’t think I want any more excitement.
I wish I could go home.
