Storm Éowyn smashed into our lives last Friday 24 January.
The power pitted out that morning and didn’t resume until the depths of Monday night (27 January).
Four days and nights of being ‘moles’!
I largely loved it. It felt like being in the Dickensian era. We lit hurricane lamps and candles. Drew portraits of one another under flickering amber lights, read to one another, played board games and cooked very slowly on the fire. Mobile phones didn’t ‘ping’. There was no power to charge them (or laptops) and no signal to receive information. Life was still, silent. Glorious.
During the storm, however, ancient, old and young trees sighed their last. This was tragic. It feels we are losing our last stalwarts. Especially as ever more furious wind whips through ever thinning woodlands.
BUT, trees can yet sprout from their recumbent sides, as life can still surge through part of their root plate. An entire new vertical trunk can grow. We have ancient wonderful examples of this in the temperate rainforests that surround us. People must curb their desire to tidy them away or to chop them into firewood.
Amid the raging storm, the horses rolled and sat in the mud to insulate themselves. They hunkered in the gorse to resist the icy bite of the winds gusting over 100 miles per hour. Corrugated iron roof sheets spun through the air alighting on the tops of trees. A caravan we were due to dismantle was flat packed. A telegraph pole nodded just above the ground.
The tidy-up operation is less pleasant and continues, as we pick debris out of trees and shrubs and fix the deer fence where trees have impaled it.
No power meant no hot water. No baths. We don’t have a shower- but dip in the icy torrents of a stream- but that was not so appealing when returning to a cold house. Washing up dishes demanded a pan of water boiled on the fire. Washing clothes, well, thankfully that wasn’t necessary.
We’re used to existing in a world without power. We spent fifteen months camping wherever our day’s run spat us out – whether rainforest, Chaco, steppe, field, hill, garden, track, side of road- when running the length of South America. We also lived for a good chunk of six years aboard an old wooden boat in some very remote places. That was nine years ago, so it’s good to have a reminder. Good to have a think of what really matters in this world and life of ours?
When the power flickers out…
Auchgoyle Farm 