A month of storms

Yarrow Reservoir overflow – Anglezarke, West Pennine Noors

“Februaries of late years are a month of storms. We get as many as two or three in succession, battering in off the Atlantic now, bringing gales and rain, the likes of which seem every season to break new records.”

So muses Rick Jeager in the latest chapter of my work-in-progress ‘Winter on the Hill’. An ageing socialist firebrand, Rick has gone to ground in an old house perched on the edge of the Western Pennines. He’s thinking back on the Left’s crushing election defeat last year, accepting that perhaps the struggle is now lost on all fronts, and imagining the course of the next few decades as the climate becomes ever more dominant in human affairs. And while he ponders, he passively watches the rain as it pours down off the moors, swelling the rivers and lifting the grids on the plain, drowning meadows and homes, on its way to the sea.

In many ways, being senior in years, the climate breakdown doesn’t matter to Rick as he won’t be around to see the worst of it, though it strikes him as curious, as his own life enters its winter months, the planet itself seems also to be set on its own end-game.

I’m a bit disappointed in Rick thus far, actually, and I’m hoping he’ll get his act together, that through his bunch of newly acquired eccentric friends in the Autumn Tints walking group, he’ll somehow rediscover his mojo – perhaps where he left it on a mountain cairn in his youth – and maybe he’ll enjoy a little late-flowering love along the way.

For myself I’m looking forward to the coming spring. I know we’ve a way to go yet but as the last Friday of February approaches and the daffodils and the crocuses make their appearance, I cannot help but feel more positive. Hopefully my own rallying mood will rub off on poor old Rick.

So,… it was a busy day yesterday, repairing fences left gap-toothed by a week of gales, repairing a nasty crack in a UPVC door that was let fly in the wind, replacing a window handle that had come off in my hand. Added to that, the boiler is on the blink again and the roof is leaking around the chimney, but only when the wind blows from a certain direction. The boiler man should sort the former out on Monday, but not I imagine without his usual sucking of teeth over various reg changes that provide him with a million reasons for walking away and leaving us without hot water, in spite of our premium-gold-peace-of-mind-or-whatever contract. As for the chimney, it’s leaked off and on for the twenty years I’ve lived here – and probably long before that – in spite of the attentions of a long line of  roofing men who have tried various fixes in exchange for my funding their holidays, and all to no avail. I shall keep the buckets in place and trust the wind changes direction.

Come on Rick, buck up, man! We need you to sort this mess out.