At about peak Boelo yesterday afternoon, I received an email from a customer asking me to pop by at my convenience to fix a broken tv aerial. What's that saying? "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good".
Here at Burnbank, we seem to have survived relatively unscathed, which is quite surprising considering the noises that the house was making last night. And talking of noises, I don't know whether it was because it was a full moon, but Mocha was very vocal and very awake during the hours of darkness. I even got up at 2am to sit in the lounge with her for a while. That cat loves attention at any time of day.
My actual planned work this morning was cancelled by the customer (and rebooked for next week) so off I went to sort out the afore-mentioned aerial. Not long after leaving Stromness, I rounded a bend and spotted a group of Whooper Swans in a roadside field. I wondered whether they might have flown south from Iceland on the back of the storm. Driving through Orphir, a bird flying over the road resolved itself into a Red Grouse, unbelievably my first of the year despite there being a small resident population in the county.
Several barbed wire fences were decorated with large swathes of silage wrap or those huge sacks which building material suppliers use. This would likely be why Orphir had no power, wet plastic and electricity not making very good bedfellows. Indeed, the next sight on my journey was a small tracked cherry-picker in the middle of a field as an engineer effected a repair to the overhead wires. Passing by some moorland, I was startled to see a large grey wheelie bin sticking out of the heather... how far had that been blown!
South of Kirkwall, I noticed a crumpled mangle of metal tubes in a front garden. It had definitely been a trampoline once, but its best days seemed behind it. I couldn't be sure if the garden where I saw it was the garden it belonged to. On over the Churchill Barriers towards my goal, and the road seemed to be strewn with more seaweed than usual. Oh, I wonder why?
Once the new tv aerial was fitted, my customer (an elderly and very religious lady who had just introduced me to the word "tisane") announced that now she would be able to watch the Formula 1 highlights from yesterday's US Grand Prix. If I ever needed reminding, don't judge a book by its cover.
Tomorrow is another batten down the hatches day, as Storm Chloe gives us the pleasure of her company.
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