Always Take The Weather

Week Nine: Sunday 26 November – Saturday 2 December

The wind has fairly battered Falmouth these past few days; the rain has been in close attendance, taking advantage of the all angled gales to give everything a good drenching.

It would appear that Falmouth has actually gotten off lightly compared to many other parts of the British Isles. Dumfriesshire, where we were living prior to moving to Cornwall, has been hit especially hard; the banks of the river Nith, that runs through Dumfries town, burst and flooded the one of the mains streets.

So, all in all, we haven’t done too badly down in this little nodule tucked away in the south-west. But that hasn’t stopped it feeling quite horrific at times.

I am one of those sleepers who take a fair bit of wakening once I’ve found my dream like space and am happily in the land of nod, waltzing through my subconscious in search of a peaceful place. Although I have become a lighter sleeper since I became a father, preparation for the days to come when my daughter is creeping in at ungodly hours, trying to disguise how late and how drunk she is, it still takes a lot to wake me up once my head is well and truly down. But I’ve been woken by the storms every night for the last four nights.

Each time I’ve woken it has been a little disturbing. The first night I woke I thought for a second or two as if I was in New Orleans, such was the ferocity with which the wind was hurtling down, round, up and down the street where I live, with the rain literally lashing every crevice it could find.

Having gathered my senses and remembered where I was, I couldn’t get back to sleep for a while; first of all just listening to the power being exercised by nature, and then thinking about just how bloody tragic and frightening it must have been to actually have been in New Orleans.

How lucky we are, not just to be protected from the worst the weather has to offer but to actually have a roof over our heads. We take so much for granted in this life; it is such a tragic flaw of the human creation that we don’t spend our time grateful for what we do have, instead bemoaning what we don’t.

The other nights I have been woken, and kept awake, by the storms I have lain in bed and wondered just what nature makes of the human abuses of the planet these last 250 odd years, and just how much it intends to reek it’s revenge now or in the not too distant future. Time will tell.

One thing for sure, after finding out how battered and bruised the rest of the British Isles has been, my wife no longer feels that she always takes the weather with her. After spending the first 38 years of her life in southern Africa, she has spent the last five with me in Portugal, Scotland and now England. In both Portugal and Scotland we were told upon arrival that the weather was the wettest/coldest/windiest for many a long year and my wife thought she had a bad weather curse. She was beginning to feel the same about England when the wind raised its ugly head; she doesn’t any more.

The ‘curse’ has been broken and we are happy, and grateful, to be alive.