After the Storm

Apparently there was a huge storm over my area in the early hours of this morning. As usual, I slept right through it.

I even slept through the Great October Storm of 1987. I lived in Teddington at the time. The morning after, I was woken by the phone ringing. It was my sister Susan. Straight away, she asked me if I was okay. "Of course" I said, puzzled, "why shouldn't I be?" "Didn't you hear it? Have you looked outside?" she asked. I pulled back the curtains to see several large trees lying across the road and total devastation all around. I flicked the switch on the kettle. No power. What a day! I can still remember the programme I was working on that afternoon, having travelled up to London in an old slam-door train carriage pulled by a diesel engine because the power was still off. It was the now long-defunct Radio 4 programme Stop the Week, presented by Robert Robinson. The recording was done on Fridays for transmission on Saturday evenings. Of the regular pool of panellists on the show, I still work from time to time with Laurie Taylor and Matthew Parris, and I recorded last weekend's edition of Saturday Review on which Barb Jungr was a guest critic. Funny how the details of some days just stick in the memory like that. Although the Great Storm happened 27 years ago, it seems as if it was just last week.

But I digress. The weather has been very dreary all day today, so I haven't bothered to go outside apart from a brief tour of the garden to look for a blip. It was so wet out there that my shoes, socks and jeans got soaked, even though it had stopped raining hours before, and the only creature in sight was a big fat slug squelching along on the grass. As slugs make my stomach turn, I decided against doing a portrait of it.

I couldn't resist another music link today, a gorgeous live version by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of The Rain Song.