An Idiot Wind.

Lord above, there’s a wind out there. Properly gusty. It’s the kind of weather ‘event’ we keep getting told will happen more, going forward (what a terrible, redundant pairing of words), due to climate change and the impact human beings have had on the planet. Not that this particularly helps. Back in the middle ages when peasants would be eating shoes, wood, mud and someone else’s shit because there was some mini ice age killing the land I can’t imagine a minstrel was roaming the countryside blaming it on climate change and rising CO2 emissions. No, they’d just blame it on God and then the peasant would die and go to hell, as his wife and children eyed his corpse up for a Sunday roast. I suspect it’s too late to blame things on our behaviour, we should just get on and weather the storm. Literally.

Today’s atmospheric discomfort is called Eunice (put your hands up if you know or have ever known a Eunice), and she’s a right mardy cow. A proper sulky moo. Leave it aaaaht Eunice, you’re ‘avin’ a right strop and it’s aaaaht of orrda! And so on. As I sit writing this in the loft sweet, gentle, misunderstood Eunice is battering away at the window and tickling the tiles. I can hear her daintily chewing off the branches and rattling the doors. She is all powerful, and she is in charge. Only she’s not really. We’ve all been warned to stay at home and to not take risks, but has everyone listened? Of course not. For all I know there is an antivax rally going on in St Ives right now, an idiot wind all of its own, bloated with indignance that yet another problem has come along to restrict our civil liberties and the right to be free. I can’t talk: this morning I drove to the gym and then I drove to the shops, and there were plenty of like minded cretins doing exactly the same. But I’m home now and unless an entire lamp post gets rifled through the Velux and my echoing skull I’m feeling like I might be ok.

Others will not. Some will meet very tragic and unfortunate ends and these will be hastily reported and repeated at various points across the day. First there will be the dog walker. They took that dog for a walk along the sea wall every day, and they weren’t about to let 90 mile an hour winds and storm surge sea levels stop them. Hey, they may even get a selfie and send it to the BBC tomorrow morning. It’s only a bit of wind and a few big waves, after all. What’s that? Oh, they’re dead now. Blown out to sea, dragged under and then smashed against the very sea wall built to protect them. The fucking idiot. And what about the dog? Ditto. Some kid will find Crumpet the cockapoo’s limp, drenched, sad body washed up a few hundred metres along the coast tomorrow morning; her last walk very much walked, and then for the last bit flown.

Then we’ll have the person flattened by an overturned lorry. It’s usually a man: women have more sense. Who would have thought that could happen? He was only sheltering from the wind behind the stupidly tall and recently unladen lorry when a gust came along, out of nowhere really, and now his chest is a tortilla. And what’s this? No, never! You mean they only wanted to pop out for a packet of biscuits and a can of Tizer and a tree’s gone and crushed them to death. I mean, what are the chances it would be the very tree they were running past that would suddenly just stop bothering to stay upright and fall right on top of them. Ooh, isn’t nature cruel? And those two fearless lads, they always looked danger right in the face. They were the life and soul, those two happy lads. They knew the risks, but what better way to catch a shot of free adrenaline than to make a paragliding video to put on YouTube. They were such happy lads. The life and soul, to be honest. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. And now look, the pair of them sliced in half at the waist by a telegraph wire. You couldn’t make it up.

So that’s nearly it from me for today. I took my gamble and I’m tucked up safe. Eunice can blow all she wants, but she’ll run out of puff eventually. I’ll pop downstairs a bit later and flick on the news and see how many hapless morons have copped one in the name of stupidity, skipping the rapture in the process because not even God would pop to the Post Office in this kind of weather. Naturally I hope that the storm passes with only a few grazes and bumps, if that; I’m not so malevolent to wish harm on even the greatest of fools. But as I listened to Eunice whistling in my ear I thought it might be an idea to write about her, before she vanishes, never to be seen again. Because it’s refreshing in a sense, when the weather turns us all to twigs and newspaper, flapping about helplessly. And helpless we are – born sick and ordered to be well. Eunice thinks we should remember that a bit more often.

G B Hewitt. 18.02.2022