What to Read when the Weather's Draughty-Dampish

Castletown (IoM) gets a hammering at New Year

I find it funny, and a little bit sad, how my attitude to stormy weather has diluted over the years. When I was a teenager, storms were pure Romance. My bedroom was in the attic (very nearly a genuine artist's garret, if only my parents hadn't been so prosaic as to insist upon central heating and a wall-to-wall carpet) and there was nothing I liked better than a good gale thrashing through the garden, whistling round the eaves and chucking rain at my Velux window. It never crossed my mind to worry about storm damage; that was mum and dad's problem. I was too busy feeling snug under my duvet and channelling the spirit of Emily Bronte.

But now, when the wind is sweeping off the Irish sea of a February night, it isn't Heathcliff and Cathy who spring to mind so much as the wheelie bin (what if it takes flight, lands in the middle of the road and causes a major pile up?); the garden fence (ditto); the roof (will it even be there in the morning?) and so on. So far we've been lucky: a fence panel fell over and three tiles blew off the roof, but nobody died and the house is still standing. It must be frightening and deeply depressing to have your home flooded or otherwise wrecked, and my heart goes out to people living in the Somerset levels and elsewhere, who are experiencing just that. Any lingering feeling for the allure of stormy weather would be extinguished forever, I should imagine, in the heart of anyone who's watched their prized possessions floating round the sitting room in a stinky, brown soup. Heathcliff himself would be yearning for a getaway break to the Med.

So I feel slightly embarrassed to be gushing about this beautiful Ted Hughes poem, Wind, which I discovered in an anthology the other day. The glamour of a gale is perhaps better appreciated when your chimney stack is not flinging itself across the garden. But I'm going to copy it out anyway. If the thought of celebrating bad weather is just too grating, and you can't afford a foreign holiday, can I recommend you read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim instead? It's one of the most cheering books ever written. That moment when Lottie Wilkins opens the shutters on her first morning in Italy...I defy you not to feel real, live sunshine on your skin. It's much less hassle than a holiday, and you can read it in your wellies.

Anyway. That Ted Hughes poem...

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.