Wind and Rain

When I spoke to my wife on the phone last night she told me a gale had been buffeting her mother's home on the mountainside overlooking Puffin Island all day. I'd been out for a walk in the fresh air that afternoon and though it had been raining I'd stayed dry and had revelled in the number of people who had wished me a good day as I wandered through the town.

However, as the evening progressed the wind built up and the rain lashed against the house. I found one remaining gap along the roof beam upstairs that was drawing down cold air from the roof space and plugged it temporarily with cotton wool - it did the trick so it is likely to become a permanent fix as it is in an out of the way spot that you have to crick your neck to get to.

My wife is in North Wales because her 87 year old mother needed some support. She's nearly blind and had developed a cyst on the one eye in which she retains some limited vision. The local NHS service seemed to be in no hurry to do anything so she'd spoken to her contacts in Liverpool (Mother has been participating in clinical trials for some years testing a drug that, when injected into the eye, inhibits deterioration of eyesight) and they called her in for a procedure to remove the cyst straightaway. After the procedure, which was successful, she was given an eye patch to wear, so anticipating being reduced to total blindness she needed her daughter's support on the return journey. As it was she discovered, to her delight, that she still retained some peripheral vision in the other eye.

Now I've been sitting in my study most of the morning listening to the wind and the rain. It may prove, using the classification made famous by the good folk of Dibley, to have been a great storm but not, I'm hope, as great as the last great storm I experienced in this house. That was The Great Storm when Carlisle was flooded and tiles were blown off the roof and on to my car smashing the rear window.