Tag Archives: storm

Day 49

18 Replies

If I finish this in the next 15 minutes I will get a note from WP congratulating me on 13  successive days of posting. I’m not sure what business it is of theirs, or why they think a condescending pat on the head contributes anything good to my WP experience.

What would contribute to the experience is an editing system that worked as well as the old, non-improved version, an an absence of improvements that cause more problems than they are worth.

It was a quiet day at work, apart from the wind. Storm Eunice, having arrived in the night and blown a few things about, blew a bit more about in the afternoon, then made a comeback in the evening but as far as we are concerned has not been a great nuisance.

The fastest gust recorded was 122 mph,  the fastest round here was 68, so you can see how much of it we escaped. When I lived out in the Fens we often had winter gusts stronger than that – you could actually see telegraph poles bending in the wind when it got going. Of course, that was in the days when we didn’t have “amber weather warnings” and the internet.

This film is quite impressive, but apart from that I’m not sure that the internet is a great benefit in times like this. I just need to know the weather is bad – I don’t need up to the minute coverage.

Looks like I’m going to sneak in and post before midnight, though it always surprises me how long it takes to finish up. At least I don’t need a title!

I hope that everyone reading this has escaped too much disruption from the storm, I’m always grateful when the wind drops as I tend to worry more as I get older.

Bad news for Zebedee

7 Replies

They had a cooking demonstration on Saturday night. You don’t need access to the calendar or the detective instincts of Sherlock Holmes to work this out – just look at the evidence.

Kitchen chairs in the centre, centre chairs in the kitchen, all our mugs in the kitchen, box of empty bottles, random cooking equipment left around, rearranged table displays and, for some reason, an explosion of Union Jacks.

It would be nice if it was clean and tidy, which was how we left it last week. However, it isn’t, and I’m not going to waste my time either discussing it or, more to the point, tidying it.

The taxi is late, again.

The polytunnel is flapping as Storm Imogen picks up speed. We’re expecting stronger winds this afternoon. I still don’t see why we need to name storms – we’ve always got by perfectly well by calling it “weather” in the past. I wonder how long it will be before we can buy a range of T shirts and mugs with various storm-related slogans – ‘Keep Calm and Harry on’ or ‘Gertrude – probably the best storm in the world’ – as the Met Office seeks to cash in.

Incidentally, there are no storms beginning with Q, U, X, Y or Z, so if you are called Queenie, Ulysses, Xavier, Yvonne or Zebedee tough luck, you are being ignored.

The taxi is here now, the rain has arrived too.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I don’t like Mondays.

Storm Clodagh comes to call

1 Reply

So Storm Clodagh came and, according to the news, will continue today.

Yesterday it showed as an hour of high winds and a a twenty minute belt of rain, so no great problem, even though I did get caught in the middle of the rain without a coat. Today it looks like it may miss us completely.

However, it did manage to pop the rails on the polytunnel again. They are a mixed blessing – simpler and easier than digging a trench and burying the edges of the plastic, and giving us the ability to adjust the tension on the plastic (which we did a couple of times in the first year) – but they have popped off a few times and left the plastic flapping.

There has been some damage in other areas of the country, but I used to live in the Cambridgeshire Fens, which is quite a windy place and I remember high winds that made telegraph poles bend. We just used to nail stuff down firmly and nobody, as far as I’m aware, felt the need to name the weather.

I’ve just been looking up how they name storms, particularly as I wasn’t sure that 70 mph was really a high wind by world standards. It was more complicated than I had thought – with six different bodies classifying and naming weather systems depending on where they originate. However, they do classify winds a lot slower than 70 mph.

The record for the highest wind speed on land (235 mph during Typhoon Paka on Guam in 1997) can’t be confirmed because it was so fast it broke the anemometer. Personally I think that breaking the anemometer was good enough as confirmation.

I also learnt that storm names, like American sport shirt numbers, can be retired.

That’s something I’ll bear in mind next time I’m caught by the rain in a supermarket car park.