The Great Storm! - Day One

Well, I have been incommunicado for the last few days – since Friday night, in fact. We were out to dinner at a friend’s on Friday night, and came home at around midnight. Our other friends who were there didn’t leave until around 4am, and as they were leaving, the Great Storm was starting.

Day One

We woke up on Saturday morning to gale force winds, and no electricity. It wasn’t a huge surprise, as the storm had been forecast. We all lay in our respective beds with the doors open and played “I packed my suitcase and in it I put…” and then “I packed my cold box and in it I put…” and then we had to resort to “The Minister’s Cat”. We stayed in bed as long as we possibly could, because it was the warmest place to be.

All morning, we still had a phone line. We have an old phone which doesn’t require electricity, so we had that plugged in, in the hallway. We did manage to speak to a few people, but by the afternoon the phone line had gone too.

Our garden was a total mess. Isla’s slide was on its side, her swing wrapped around tree branches. The Leylandii at one point were almost horizontal, as was our little palm tree. At one point while we were still in bed, Isla was sitting inside on the window sill watching the wind in the garden, and saw a big branch flying across the driveway, and hitting into the back of the car, smashing the back windscreen. She said it was really weird – there was no noise, it was like watching a silent movie. When we finally got up we lit the fire and had some food. We left my dad at home, and braved the weather to go out and check other peoples’ houses. We went to one that had a couple of massive trees down, but the house itself was ok. Another one has some tiles off the roof, and another has another massive tree down, but miraculously all the houses themselves are ok.
The area had been devastated though. There were trees down across the roads everywhere, taking down power lines and phone lines. The centuries old village wall has collapsed, but most houses have escaped undamaged, but some friends of ours have lost their barn which collapsed on top of their camper van and their white van. Another friend of ours has had her house burn down – but that was before the storm. However, after the storm, they discovered that their van had been squashed too. So the rest of us don’t really have much reason to complain. We are lucky at home, because we have a gas cooker – oven as well as hob. So we could still cook. A lot of people only have electricity, which makes life rather difficult! However, we didn’t use the oven to cook, mainly because it’s crap – we live in rural France – the insulation around the oven has been eaten by mice! It makes it a rubbish oven, but a very effective heater! So, we had baked potatoes – wrapped in tin foil and baked in the red hot coals of the fire! They were gorgeous – I’ve never had baked potatoes so light and fluffy and creamy on the inside. A friend of ours, Moses (not real name!), came over in the evening as his house was freezing! He ate with us, and we introduced him to the delights of “I packed my suitcase…” and “The Minister’s Cat”, and then we played charades, which was a bit difficult in the semi-light!

The one thing we didn’t manage to do was wash ourselves – our water is heated by gas, but the gas heater ignites electrically! So, we spent a day being dirty, which was nasty.

When Moses left, my mum and I stayed up for a bit longer asking trivial pursuit questions. We didn’t want to go to bed too early because we’d never get to sleep. As we were going to bed though, my mum’s mobile rang! It was the alarm company of one of the houses we had been to in the afternoon. So, we had to go up to the house and check it out! It was about 2am, we had to walk up the driveway in the dark, as the tree was across the driveway, and had to go into the house in the dark with no electricity! It wasn’t much fun. Luckily everything was ok – I think that the power must have gone on and off a couple of times upsetting the alarm and making it go off. We didn’t get to bed until nearly 3am.