What's Your Weather Like...? MK5...

It started to rain here at 15.50pm and the wind dropped a bit for a while. It's still raining, although not torrential, and the wind has picked up slightly. So far the wind has been the biggest character of the bad weather. The temperature is 44f so it's not that mild.

 

Its got properly windy here! I've just had to go and chase our food bin which was attempting to get up the street, and then had to secure a garden chair that apparently thought it was a kite! Managed to get it before it went near my beloved greenhouse though.

 

I think it was a couple of Winters ago when one of my garden chairs took flight in high winds and landed in a neighbours garden over a hundred yards away. I didn't even realise that it was missing until she knocked on my door to give it me back. Luckily for me she'd been in my garden before and knew the chair was mine because of the colour and style.....otherwise she'd have kept it!!

 

The worst storm I can recall was on a Boxing Day (1998 I think) - I was at my mum's for Christmas, and as I worked in retail I was going to drive home on Boxing Day ready for the shop to open the following day. My mum tried for hours to persuade me not to go because she was worried about the weather - I was doing the boy thing, and telling her that I would be fine - anyway, lunch was offered before I headed off, and being a growing lad I couldn't resist a nice lunch so stayed a while.

Just after lunch, I heard a noise in the back garden, so opened the back door (on the side of the house) and stepped out only to be blown right into the back garden, and I didn't stop until I hit the shed! I spent the next hour or so trying to put stuff away, or bundle it in a heap to stop it blowing away; when the gazebo ripped itself out of the ground and took out the greenhouse, I gave up and retired indoors.

I spent the remainder of the night watching the electricity cables shorting out up on the hill, listening to bits being blown off houses, listening to our roof creaking and groaning (and quietly bricking myself that it was about to blow off), and even heard a few of the large coping stones blowing out of neighbouring houses roofs, one of which landed in a car a few doors down (went clean through the car roof).

The following day, it calmed down a bit so I headed home - and had to battle past fallen trees and flooding all over the place - one tree in particular was blocking the A701, but the way it was lying between the verges, cars could still get underneath - and there was a lorry driver, stuck, who was holding the smaller branches up to help people in cars snuggle under it and get away on with their journey.

When I got home, I found that our back garden fence had disappeared - it surfaced a few days later, three streets away, but as you will imagine it was little more than firewood.


Just as an aside, this weather we are getting now - could it be related to Sandy that hit America recently?

 

I'm pretty sure it's related, FC, although not directly because of the direction the weather has come from.

 

I think Sandy went off toward Greenland or something initially, but I suppose its possible that its been round the block a bit since its visit to America - thankfully, its lost some of its grunt.

 

We've been a bit lucky round here. There were some heavy gusts of wind around lunchtime yesterday but it gradually eased up during the afternoon and evening. Most of the day was sunny and blustery.

This morning there's hardly a breeze and it looks as though the sun might come out.