The power has just come back on, so I am going to post quickly, before it can go off again. I should have been at work, but after watching the wind strengthen steadily between seven this morning and half past, when I needed to leave the house, and having heard on the radio that the storm was due to hit London at seven, I thought I'd delay going in until the worst was past. According to the weather forecast, the storm was due to move out over the North Sea by mid-morning, although that's bad luck for the poor old Dutch, as it will be even bigger by the time it hits land again.
Nobody answered when I rang in to work to say I'd be late. It occurred to me that of course if all the staff were delayed then there were no servants to answer the phone, but since the answering machine didn't kick in either I guessed they had no electricity as well. I eventually got through to the owner, who sounded harried, as well she might be, and said there was no point in driving in the worse of it, and later would be fine. They had a power cut.
With no lights in the shop, the till running off a generator, and little prospect of customers, there was not even a great deal of point in going in, but I thought I should show willing, once the worst of the wind had dropped, since there was going to be an awful lot of picking up and sweeping up to do in the plant centre. By quarter past ten the wind had dropped back to a normal late autumn stiff breeze with strong gusts, and I packed up my lunch and left for Suffolk.
I didn't get very far. As I reached the first bend in the road I found it blocked by a large weeping willow that had collapsed out of a neighbour's garden. Reversing back to the farm entrance, and heading off the other way round the block, I found the alternative route blocked by a fallen holm oak. That run of trees has been dodgy for a while: one came down last winter, in much less wind that this storm, sending us on a five mile detour to get home when we were almost in sight of the farm.
After I'd gone home, and rung work again to say that I wouldn't be in at all because both roads were blocked, the Systems Administrator pointed out that I could have trespassed along the track across the farm. The farmer almost certainly wouldn't object, partly because he is a very decent bloke, and because it might encourage us to start objecting to his activities, like lorries on Sunday mornings, and industrial scale complexes of polytunnels. I had totally forgotten the farm track, but the postman obviously hadn't, because soon after that today's post arrived.
A quick survey of the garden and wood suggests that the damage is not too bad. The new piece of acrylic popped out of the roof of my greenhouse, but fortunately without snapping, so it can be reinstalled tomorrow when the weather's calmer. More annoyingly, two more panes of glass have started sliding out, and one has snapped midway under its own weight, so we'll have to buy another piece of acrylic, which is another sixty quid down the drain. The SA checked that the lower edges of all the glass panes in the greenhouse roof were fastened after the first one slid out, but the storm must have broken or dislodged some of the original fastenings. As I've said before, it is quite an old greenhouse.
We haven't lost any trees in the garden or down the edge of the wood, that we can see. A dying silver birch in the wood has come down, but that's fine, as it was going to drop at some point, and now it has done it at a time when nobody was underneath. My Robinia hispida is smashed up, but that's not surprising, as they are terribly brittle shrubs, and it will regrow. The only really tricky thing is that one of the willows on the boundary has sagged forward so that it is hanging over the ditch bed, partly resting on a large hazel. That can't be left as it is, because it is unsafe, and if it comes down in a rush it is going to land on some nice shrubs underneath. The SA thinks we will be able to tackle it from the side, using the Henchman platform. I'm not convinced that is going to be high enough, on the other hand renting a cherry picker would cost a fortune, and create a terrible mess in the ditch bed getting it in place.
The wider news is that a double decker bus blew over in Hadleigh, five or six miles up the road from where I work, at around eight this morning just as I was scheduled to arrive at work. Some of the rides on Clacton Pier have collapsed, and Tendring Council has run out of chain saws. I'm not counting on our roads being cleared any time soon. Lucky there's the farm track.
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