Last week the forecasters went overboard telling us all to ‘prepare’ for damaging gale-force winds. I know some people in the south and south-east had a bad time during Sunday night, trees fell down, tiles came off roves and one nursery suffered devastating destruction of their fruit trees. But here in the Midlands it really wasn’t too bad.
Last night was a different story though. When I went to bed the wind was scarily strong and caused me to sleep sporadically with thoughts of ripped polytunnels and damaged plants. (One year we lost 3 covers due to very strong winds.) there have been countless times when I have worried about the outcome unnecessarily and, fortunately, this was another false alarm. But during the day the wind was still too fierce to want to work out in the garden so I fiddled about and achieved very little. How annoying. And how often do I wish I had a job which wasn’t weather dependant?
It wasn’t as bad as forecast down here, which was as well as I was on the point of putting in a laurel hedge using semi-mature specimens, a replacement for rampant bamboos, which I’d crow-barred out. Lots of stems and leaves, relatively little root-ball with it.
Things had quietened down by the time I got to actually put them all in. Otherwise I think they would all have toppled and been flattened.
I hope the tunnels etc emerged unscathed after all that. Oh, and as all the South West Trains for quite a swathe of South East UK were all cancelled because of the gales, I’m not sure there IS such a thing as a job unaffected by weather. Very few made it into work that day down here.