SO… HOW WAS YOUR STORM…? (PART ONE...?)

To be perfectly honest with you, I think that personally, we got off extremely lightly (at least - and not wanting to tempt fate - at the time of writing anyway…)

Given that 100+ mph winds were lashing much of the country, and the parts that weren't being battered by hurricane force winds were already disappearing under several feet of water (and the rest), all-in-all, my own little adventures left me fairly unscathed.

I had a "fun" journey home which involved calling in as planned at the supermarket, and having that interesting moment when your carrier bags are hanging horizontally as you walk back across the car park, and I'd had to call in at mum's flat to give it its weekly once over before scribbling "Deceased - R.T.S." on all of the junk mail, battling my way through the gales to a pillar box, and posting it back to wherever it came from.

Then, after negotiating my way through the rain-and-windswept rush hour traffic, I'd had to wait at the station to meet my Beloved. This is always fun when the car is being lifted up by the occasional gust and you're pondering upon whether the trains will have been cancelled due to the height of the viaduct and wondering whether you might have to fight your way back in to town to an alternative rendezvous point.

As a small aside, at such moments, I do sometimes find myself pondering upon how much of my few precious seconds of life has been spent waiting in car parks, but it's far too depressing a thing to think about too often, so I try to dismiss such thoughts when they try to resurface.

Happily, within a few minutes, she appeared, and we headed to her parents for our scheduled visit, only to be sent away with a pot of dinner to warm through and were told in no uncertain terms to get ourselves home as soon and as safely as we could whilst there was still a smidgen of daylight in the sky.

That journey was a small adventure in itself and it's only when you're looking up at all of them, and not really wanting to stop within close proximity to any of them, that you begin to realise quite how many trees that there are along the route between our two houses. There were some cars stopped at the sides of the roads, and I did wonder whether it was due to the falling branches having broken a window or two, a thought strengthened by the almighty "BANG" which surprised us as a chunk of branch landed on the roof of our own car.

Still, we reassured each other, if that's the worst that happens…

And, of course, it was. The rest of an admittedly rather scary journey passed uneventfully and we arrived home to find the entire valley in pitch darkness, and outside our front door, one of the larger plant pots at the front of the house had blown over, but that was generally it.

Once I'd manoeuvred all of my stuff out of the car in the pitch darkness (because, for once, typically, we had no torches with us) and into the house and then scrambled around in the blackness for the lamp we keep for such situations, the power actually came back on just a few moments later.

Granted it cut out from time to time throughout the evening which meant at worst that the alarm clock settings went rather doo-lally, and the broadband hub had to keep being rebooted, but we were able to see the unpleasantness that was being suffered by other people as we tuned in to the local news bulletins between the power outages, and so reminded ourselves of how lucky we were to have got ourselves home in one piece and that we were not having to venture outside again on such an evening.

And so the evening passed with us listening to the howling of the wind and passing on reports of road closures and rail cancellations from TwitWorld just in case they were of some use to somebody (which, it seems, they weren't...), and being suitably shocked as images of the damage being done to some familiar buildings were published…

There was a lot of branch debris on the roads and car parks as I drove in the following morning, but I only actually saw one tree which had been blown over along the course of my usual route to work, and there was that strange phenomenon of salt residue being everywhere due, presumably, to the amount of sea water which had been flying about, but, again, my little world seemed to have got off rather lightly.

So, I think that I can probably say that, all-in-all, our experience of the storm was fairly uneventful, as, I hope, yours was, too…

Keep yourselves safe, everybody.