There’s A Storm A Comin’

January 11th

There’s A Storm A Comin’

Mrs B’s first words this morning were “That was a windy night”.
I apologised of course, but then realised she meant the wind rattling the window from the outside, not the inside.

We always sleep with the window open a little, can’t abide a stuffy room. I think it stems from being raised in a house with no central heating and no double glazing. Even when I moved away from home my lodgings were not heated upstairs and waking up with ice on the inside of the bedroom window pane was normal during the winter months.

In those dim and distant days of my past, when I worked shifts, a stormy night shift was something I enjoyed. First of all it blew all the idiots home to their beds rather than having them wandering the streets plus if it got too wet there were always interesting places to shelter.

Car sales forecourts, always worth a check, occasionally you might find that they’d left a car unlocked.

Hotels, with night porters, always welcomed you in for a chat and a coffee.

Woolworths, that dates me I know, had a night watchman. His name was Dougie and he had a wooden leg and a constant drip from the end of his nose - but he made a good cup of tea.


If you were lucky, one of your mates might pick you up for a warm and a ride around. That did end up being a bit risky though, as one night I climbed in the back of a warm car and fell asleep…and woke up in Retford. I should have been on the High Street in Lincoln!

The best part of 40 years have passed, but I remember some of the night people you’d see as you wandered those mostly deserted streets. There was a little lady in a blue raincoat and white wellingtons who was only ever seen at night. What was her name?

There was Mr Scofield, a tall man with a scruffy beard and a lack of hygiene that meant you could smell him long before you saw him. In a long brown overcoat and a trilby hat, with his small mousey wife dragging along behind, the old pervert had a habit of exposing himself.

There were proper old fashioned drunks, like Martin, who swore and spat at you. I think he’d been arrested by every police officer in Lincoln.

I recall them all, some with greater clarity than others. I recall something else; there were no homeless people sleeping in doorways. How times have changed.

There were nights as I walked around the Cathedral and Castle Square that the only noise you heard was an owl offering its mournful cry to the moon. Or as you walked the tree lined avenues, empty of traffic, it was just the wind, making those trees dance and sing.


I sit here now, looking out at the Hawthorne tree in the garden, bare branches waving to no-one in particular as the wind gusts up the side of the hill.

The wind that may crack and fell a mighty tree, the tree too stiff to change…the Hawthorne survives because it can give a little and ride the storm. Maybe there’s a lesson for us all in that?