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

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

I was at a boarding school in North London. I was 12, and we were (not) sleeping in dormitories. It was exciting and worrying, magnified by the fact that there were about 6 boys in my dorm, and 40 or so in other dorms. No-one could sleep, obviously.

What I remember most clearly was the intense bright orange light from the sodium lamps outside, against which the trees were lashing. We could also hear distant crunches as trees came down.

It was still amazingly windy the next day when we walked to the dining hall for breakfast. Big trees were down all over the playing fields and the roads, and you could hold open your duffel coat and lean into the wind, being kept upright at silly angles.