I barely slept last night, finding myself wide awake at two o’clock and then waking every few minutes from then on. What was that all about? I gave up trying to sleep at five o’clock and watched “People Just Do Nothing” as I scoffed toast, then had a look-see on-line. It was probably too early to have seen much this morning, but what I did see was mostly people preparing for the forecast storm… I say “preparing”; spreading panic-inspiring memes is probably a better description.
With no emails worth having I ignored the invitation to a sale of bondage equipment (!) and got ready for the off.
I left home whilst it was still dark. The wind was picking up, and the pundits on the radio had a lot to say about the wind. They have a lot to say most mornings, but this morning there seemed to be something of a theme... They had a lot of interviews with people in all sorts of places where the forecast storm was due to hit. No one had anything to report; just to say that they were all expecting the worst. And they also had a lot of interviews with people in all sorts of places in the Ukraine where the Russian army is supposed to be invading. And these people also had nothing to report; just to say that they too were all expecting the worst.
I'd left home early to go to Sainsburys. The place was rather quiet, as you might expect at seven o'clock. I bought far too many doughnuts, and took them in to work. Doughnuts were appreciated by all at tea time. Both jam doughnuts (as God intended) and custard doughnuts (an abomination).
At tea time I finished my e-book. On 6 December last year I downloaded the first of the "Harry Potter" books to my phone's Kindle app. Today I finished the last one. Those seven books kept me occupied for two and a half months. They were rather good; starting as very much a child's story they got progressively darker as they went on. Part of me would like to know what happens to Harry Potter next, but like all stories, it is best to end it on a high, rather than dragging it on for evermore ("Last of the Summer Wine" and "Doctor Who" spring to mind).
I've now downloaded an old favourite book of mine. I've read "Brideshead Revisited" so many times... if you've never read it, give it a go.
As the day wore on so the wind picked up. The forecast had been for the worst winds since “My Boy TM” was ten days old, but the pundits on the radio over-exaggerate so much that I hadn't taken them seriously. But I think it fair to say we did have the worst winds for years, with bridges closing and all the county's buses stopping as the day went on. Perhaps the road closures might have been better taking place earlier? But (like me) no one really expected the winds that came today.
I blame the media. I can't help but feel that they should be held to account for their scaremongering. People might have taken the ongoing pandemic more seriously at the start had the last twenty years not been an endless merry-go-round of end-of-the-world horror stories of mad cow disease and AIDS and zika virus and bird flu and swine flu and whatever.
An early start meant an early finish. I drove out of the works car park and got a hundred yards down Hermitage Lane before having to do a U-turn because the road was blocked. Thinking myself very clever I took a detour which would go past the DFS shop, and was stuck in a traffic jam for half an hour whilst the police chain-sawed the fallen tree that had come down from outside the DFS store.
Once home I walked the dogs round the block. Pogo started to kick off at another dog… then suddenly realised what he was doing, shut up and looked at me in a very apologetic sort of way.
I’d walked the dogs immediately on getting home. And with dogs walked I had a look in the garden fully expecting the rickety fence between our garden and not-so-nice-next-door to be matchwood. I was rather amazed to find no storm damage to the garden at all (so far). I shall have another look in the morning.
“er indoors TM” came home with a job lot of shopping, and boiled up fish and chips which we scoffed whilst watching “Celebrity Hunted”.
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