I'm in love with every strange unfolding day as the storm begins to break cover

[venta]

The BBC has just reminded me that it's twenty years today since the "Great Storm" in 1987. Among people my age - old enough to rember it, not really old enough to appreciate that it was more than a spot of run-of-the-mill bad weather - I suspect it's most commonly remembered as the storm which arrived in defiance of Michael Fish's jocular remarks that there was no need to worry. That he didn't really say that is largely irrelevant, of course; some stories are too big to be squashed by their own fallacy.

On the night of the Great Storm I was camping in a tent. Fortunately, only in a friend's back garden. We were determined to stay there - she had 50p riding on it, as her brother had bet we would wuss out even before the weather worsened. Her mother became increasingly determined as the night wore on that we were coming in the house. Her mother won, and I still remember being surprised the following morning by the wreckage of the garden: the large, heavy camping stove we'd cooked on the night before thrown across the lawn and the tent demolished.

I don't think the north got it nearly as badly as the south east did. Anyone else have any particular memories of it ?

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I pretty much slept through it. Woke up briefly in the night a couple of times and thought "sounds a bit windy", but that was it.

But really Oxford was on the margin of it -- I was in London the weekend after, and amazed to see the number of trees down in Hyde Park. And one big plane tree in Knightsbridge somewhere that had fallen onto and squashed a small red expensive-looking Alfa Romeo -- I shouldn't have laughed, but I did.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

My school (West Oxon) lost half a dozen 300 year old trees but other than that I can't think of much that was damaged on that side of the city; our old village in South Oxon suffered two or three damaged thatched roofs and a few trees down too.