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

[neilh.livejournal.com]

I was doing a paper round at the time, so was one of the first people to see the damage on the round I did - which was one of the poshest streets in Tonbridge. There were a number of trees fallen and a lot of the houses had lost tiles from their roofs. There was one I remember in particular where a tree had landed resting against the gable end of a house, perfectly aligned in the middle, had it been a couple of foot to either side it would have fallen down the roof onto the wings on either side.

That morning, like every morning, all the papers got delivered, albeit a little late because the delivery van had a bit of trouble getting down from London.