An Average Night

Had a good day. Stories in the Millennium Centre, Breton dancers, relaxed time with good friends, brisk walk home to read a little more of Writing Down the Bones before cooking a (very) late lunch. After an evening pottering, I was in bed by 10:30, aware that the wind was picking up.

Couldn't get off to sleep but too whacked to get up, I eventually stretched out an arm and felt for the radio button. The Shipping forecast was just beginning:

There are warnings of gales in Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Fitzroy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland.

What a list!

Vaguely wondering how Cromarty, Forth and Forties were missing out, I dozed off. It was, after all, a familiar bedtime story and I was under a duvet, warm and dry. I crossed the North Sea in a storm Force 10 once, and I didn't want to think of what they might be going through out there. I dozed off again.

Some while later, I woke with a jump to the sound of a whistling kettle in the bedroom. I don't have one, especially in the bedroom. It was the gales. They had reached Splott at just the right angle to whistle through the frames of my double-glazed draught proof windows. If I had left one open as usual, it would have been torn off its hinges.. OK, lift the eyeshield and take a quick peek at the clock. Ugh. 3:15. So I went into meditation mode to slip under the whistling, and dozed off again.

Until about 5, when a freight train passed along the track at the bottom of the garden. I don't normally notice them, but this one had a sticking brake or something that clanked as it rolled. In fact, it was quite pleasant lying there hearing the clanks gradually getting louder as it approached, then fading into nothingness as it receded. But 5am! Neither one thing nor the other. I adjusted the eye shield to total blackness and lay there debating whether to get up.

Success at last! While debating, I went into a proper sleep and when I woke up at 8:30 the sun was streaming into the room. So, ten hours in bed and I woke exhausted but lying in the sun, thinking that a whistling kettle in the bedroom mightn't be such a bad idea, if I had a box of teabags and a mug...