Weather windows

As they tend to, the latest storm has moved on elsewhere for the moment and as I write, the air has calmed down just a little back in Scotland.

We know this because even whilst away the Internet gives us access to the Campbeltown webcam which has survived the big storm to give us this lovely shot of the Christmas lights coming on behind the harbour. Unlike a few days ago when the surface of Campbeltown Loch was being picked up and thrown about by the wind, rain spotting the camera lens, now twinkling lights are being reflected off the water and the boats are looking snug and safe.

Meanwhile, in Worthing we gaze at the sunset from the window of our Tony’s flat, not a million miles from Kintyre but a rather different skyline to the one we are used to, the one which often has eagles glaring at us from the skies above who I often imagine to be drooling at the sight of prey they see far beneath them.

Worthing has a large population of very large gulls which soar overhead then swoop down on chip-wrapper leavings before settling on the rooftops at night. There is also a large elderly population here, not that dissimilar from Carradale really, but here they must be generally less mobile as so many of them are rampaging around the streets in their electric wheelchairs, bouncing up and down the kerbs and risking life and limb crossing busy streets. There are so many of these contrivances that a booming sale and repair market has spring up, bringing new life to the business community. I can’t make out whether it is just my imagination but it seems that a rider’s grim face always appears along with the whining sound of a mobility scooter. Perhaps one should not underestimate the degree of coordination required to pilot one of these chariots, steered as they are via the smallest of joysticks and for an elderly person not brought up on the wonders of Playstation or the Xbox, guiding this machine around pedestrianized streets must represent a significant challenge. So the serious face may be nothing more than concentration, with a touch of blind panic thrown in. I do wonder, however, whether the faces might also be reflecting our disapproval, as if we, the able-bodied, make the rider feel they are doing something antisocial, as if we are saying “You are a menace to us all on that thing!” or “Surely you’re fit enough to be walking!” Perhaps it is just that society hasn’t quite made the adjustment to accept this relatively new form of transport as a part of our lives. Perhaps the first person to ride on a horse also had a grim set to their features that were misinterpreted by those around them.

From Tony’s place we move on to Ticehurst to visit my mother, herself of a venerable age but as yet not having succumbed to the mobility scooter. She has always been a good walker, striding along towing others in her wake, and few people in her own age group have ever been able to keep up with her. Approaching ninety now she complains at her failing faculties but she still wants to get out and about in the countryside whenever she can. It frustrates her that she cannot do this as often as she likes and wintry weather in particular cramps her style. She has made the right choice in living in the most benign corner of the country, weather-wise, a place where rainfall generally comes in fitful sprinkles or sometimes not at all and wind barely ruffles the hair.

Or so we thought…

Yet another of those bizarre Met Office overlaid maps with their threatening amoeba-like blobs of colour tells the story of wind and rain for the next few days. It seems we just cannot escape, no matter where we go. We now need to time our journey home so as to slide between the yellow growths as they shuffle across the country, not an easy thing to achieve. Somewhere in the past, before the advent of amoeba-covered charts, we would have set off blindly and got home safely without the stress that comes from worrying about where the predicted rainstorm is going to strike or when the forecast wind will carry us away. Are we really better off today with the help of all this information?

In the end our journey home proved far more acceptable than the forecast led us to expect. Some rain showers did find us and there was some wind but somehow we managed to avoid anything really nasty. Back here in Scotland the landscape has changed in our absence but our house has survived whatever has been thrown at it whilst we were away. Only the windows bear testament to the storm, spattered as they are with a salty residue, a little bit of Atlantic Ocean transported across Kintyre, no doubt.

We have barely recovered from our journey but can’t wait to get out and about so we can see what effect the onset of winter has had. There are white tops on all the summits now and with ice on the path up Deer Hill, some care is needed.

Whilst tradition dictates that we bring a tree inside the house at this time of year, it wasn’t difficult to find a suitable one outside for this picture… and the halo on top came free. So we wish all our readers a very Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2012.

And regards from Ailsa too.

Storm warnings

Once again we are putting ourselves through the torment of a seemingly endless car journey the length of Britain, our legs going stiff from sitting in the car for so long, our eyes straining to see through the spray picked up from the motorway surface and atomised in front of us, our arms aching from hanging onto the steering wheel shuffling it from side to side.

Can there be anyone left in this country who derives any pleasure from driving long distances on our roads… apart from Jeremy Clarkson, that is?

The day before we set off the ‘Rest-and-be-Thankful’ pass on the A83 between Inverary and Tarbet was blocked by a landslip, as it frequently is in winter, this time the steep slope beside the road being made unstable by the vast quantities of rain we have been experiencing of late. Minutes before we arrived there the road was again pelted by hail but despite this we did get through safely and by the time we were on the motorway heading south on the outskirts of Glasgow we thought we were through the worst. Then one of the black-edged clouds hovering up in the sky, stuffed to bursting with snow, caught us by surprise, determined as it was to empty its load on the M74 before we could get away. The sky darkens, an icy wind whips up and our wheels are soon making dark tracks through a white blanket covering the road surface. We can tell though that this is more sleet than proper snow as the flakes are splattering wetly on our windscreen (proper snowflakes are lighter so they don’t actually touch the windscreen, they are buffeted away on the wedge of compressed air which rides just ahead, skimming over the roof of the car) but still the lower portion of each car and lorry disappears into spray and our wipers sweep great blobs of sticky white stuff aside. We push on into the maelstrom for fifteen minutes or so until we see light in the sky ahead and we know we have survived the worst the cloud can do. The air warms a little now and we emerge into a dryer world, one just beyond the reach of the cloudburst.

But we still have many miles to travel, we are just starting out, and there are plenty of other clouds up there with our names etched on them so we plod on hour after hour, stopping now and again for coffee, switching places in the car, then back on the road again.

We stop for one night in Coventry then journey onwards to Worthing in Sussex the next day. It is here that our mission takes place, helping to install Tony, our eldest, into a new apartment. Our little yellow car is being used to transport more than just us. Somehow we have managed to squeeze a table and four chairs in through the rear door together with inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags for us to use until we are able to fit out the apartment properly. On arrival there is much to be done to ensure Tony can live there worry-free. We get to meet his neighbours, learn to navigate ourselves to the nearest shops, install his personal effects then take a break to visit son Mike in Yeovil, part of a round tour of our scattered family.

Out of interest, when we are away we like to check on what the weather is doing back home on Kintyre, just to see what we are missing out on. When the south coast of England does receive severe weather the locals make a big fuss over it, going on about how unusual it is, how many years since this temperature or that rainfall. For those of us living on the west coast of Scotland, severe weather is more the norm and what we class as exceptional is more extreme than most people have the stomach for. Kate and I reserve the term ‘exciting’ for these events and when we check with the Met Office we see immediately that just such an exciting event is winding itself up over our area of Scotland. Their colour-coded severe weather warnings overlaid on the map of Britain tell us that the central belt of Scotland, which stretches from Campbeltown to Edinburgh, is being blasted by a storm of truly magnificent proportions. Since moving to Carradale we have already experienced several of these storms and we have great confidence in our ‘wee hoosy’ in its ability to stand up to storms of this severity. Being so far away when this one hits means that things are completely outside our control anyway but nevertheless it still leaves us with a feeling of disquiet. There will almost certainly be a path of destruction carved across Scotland in fallen trees and damaged roofs and this time all we can do is take comfort in the thought that if we were at home then there would be little we’d be able to do either, apart from lose sleep listening to the wind howling past outside.