Thursday. 7.50 a.m. Well, the title of this post says it all. The wind has been strong enough to take your head off, making even standing up straight really difficult, but I'm not so sure about the cracking teeth! But I can really imagine how poor old King Lear felt when he was on that blasted heath! Shakespeare uses weather a great deal as metaphors in his plays. In Lear, particularly, it represents Lear's state of mind. Well, I suppose if your daughters were to treat you in the way Goneril, Regan and Cordelia treat him, it's no surprise he's gone off his head and is wandering, literally and physically.
We've just had Storm Dudley crashing through, blowing over trees, tearing roof tiles off houses and generally causing havoc, mostly, it would seem, in the north of England and Scotland. We await the next storm to come in, Eunice. Will she be worse than Dudley? Probably, so batten down the hatches.
7.35 p.m. I am continuing with my writing. I am in the process of a new character. It's strange when I am in the creation process that a character which isn't real can begin to become almost 'real.' I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you spend so much time imagining this fictional person that you can almost hear their voice and, in some cases, see them. I suppose this is what happens when you read a book, you imagine what the characters are like and the locations in which they live.
Friday. 5.45 a.m. The sound of wind outside has woken me up, so here I am once more working on writing this. I did the washing up at around 2 a.m. and sorted my washing for going in the washing up machine later, as well as the recycling, which is in its sack ready to take out. I have a feeling the wind is going to get stronger as the day progresses.
Watching BBC Breakfast this morning, they had a piece from the Environment Agency telling us how NOT to go near the sea and other places, such as flooded rivers, but then it was all contradicted by one of their reporters (but I think there may have been more, but I didn't keep my television on much longer.) was reporting from Porthcawl. The sea was being whipped up by Storm Eunice, but the gentleman didn't seem to be in the least bothered. So, why do we get a message to keep away one minute and then a reporter doing the exact opposite? This sort of thing has happened so many times over the years on BBC Breakfast. One of the most memorable being during floods somewhere in England, and a reporter actually standing in the water, up to his knees. What sort of message does it send? It's dangerous, so don't do it. Or are BBC reporters immune in some way? Just plain arrogance. Can they not report from a safer position? Or from a studio?
12.35 p.m. It's still windy. I don't mean a slight breeze. I mean a really powerful storm, shaking the branches of the trees I can see from my kitchen window. It's rattling the doors in my flat. I have taken Alfie out briefly, but I'm reluctant to venture out until much later because there's the possibility of trees being blown down or branches falling and hitting us. I will keep an eye on things and decide whether to go out or not. At the moment, probably not.
We did go out, considerably later than normal. It was still howling a gale, but it was necessary for Alfie to go out.
Saturday. 3.40 a.m. Well, would you believe it? I'm here again, in my armchair, in the lounge, having had a shave. I woke up and decided, because I couldn't sleep, to write a bit more of this blog post. The wind has gone, or, at least, Storm Eunice, has gone. It's peaceful, but I know there has been a great deal of damage, to both life and property. The O2, formerly known as the Millennium Dome in London, has been damaged. Great chunks of it's roof, if that's what you term a sort of large tent/dome, have been ripped off, so you can see the interior, and the top section of a spire of a church in Wells in Somerset has fallen off, videoed by someone on their mobile phone, as shown on the television news yesterday evening.
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