Battening down the hatches

There's a storm coming.

Looking out of the window next to the computer desk, the sun of our last light evening of the year is setting into a sullen mass of slate-grey cloud building over Snowdonia and spreading east towards us.  This isn't the 'St Jude Storm' promised for Sunday night and the early hours of Monday, but a warm-up act rattling in tonight with the promise of heavy rain and high winds.

Neither used to worry me a great deal, and I'm still fairly relaxed about the rain, but living on top of a hill makes high winds much more of a worry.  During the 1987 hurricane, I was living in Southampton and, despite the fact that the South Coast bore the brunt of it, I managed to sleep right through the storm, even with my father and our next-door neighbour making emergency repairs to the flat roof above my bedroom at one point, only becoming aware that something had happened when I switched the radio on and heard a list of school closures being read out.  'Funny,' I thought, 'I don't remember anything about a teachers' strike on the news.'  And then I drew the curtains and realised I could see a great deal more of the Solent than I used to be able to from my window, because there was a bloody great oaktree missing between our house and the waterfront. 

There was another mighty storm in 1990, but I dozed through that as well, being mildly sedated still after having my wisdom teeth removed.

Since moving north, high winds have been more worrying.  We had a pretty hefty storm during our first winter up here, and consequently found ourselves scurrying round the garden in the wee small hours, wellies and water-proofs on over pyjamas, rounding up the panels from our recently-erected polycarbonate greenhouse.  One of them was never found, in fact, despite house-to-house enquiries along the street, so there are a couple of panes of horticultural glass in a section of the roof instead.  After this episode, Jon re-engineered the original structure to include additional bracing to an impressive level of over-engineering, and with the hedgerow behind it now mature, the 'polycarb' should now be safe.

I'm more concerned about the lean-to greenhouse on the back of the house this year, having pruned out a section of the shrubbery along the west side of the garden to restore our view of the Long Mynd during the summer.  While the tall Philadelphus may have looked scraggy during the winter, the bare stems still offered a bit of a windbreak, and although the extra light has enabled the herb garden to flourish, a trashed lean-to will be a high price to pay for that.  So it's fingers crossed that after all the build-up and the hype, it all turns out to be a storm in a teacup after all.