That, for sure it wasn’t. We are used to windy weather in Scotland, and storms hitting 60-70mph are normal this time of the year, but Éowyn was something else. I have never experienced anything of this sort, and at the hight of it thought more than once my office window was going to get blown in by the prolonged gusts. And the windchill took me by complete surprise, we were struggling to keep the house warm, inspite of it being 5C or so outside.

I am going to head out as soon as it gets a bit lighter to asses things, but it looks like we just lost a bit of a fence to a neighbour’s tree / ivy ball at the back of the garden; it’s sitting on the wood shed, but the shed itself seems fine — I’ll happily settle for that. My through the wall neighbrour had ridge tiles come of the roof on their cars, from our windows I can see multiple demolished fences and a fallen tree.

There are more trees down just around the corner where we can’t see. The collapse of a shop just a few miles down the road has made the national news (even made it into the rag I’d not wipe my arse with if it was the last piece of paper on earth); the local hospital lost power for a significant amount of time (and when the backup generators finally kicked in, it took the entire IT system down).

I really hope this was, as it was being described yesterday, a once-in-a-generation event. But I expect that is a wishful thinking, expressions like these are used these days so often they are becoming meaningless. What I am certain of is that yesterday we came close to the limit that our houses can withstand, anything more and we were looking at a major humanitarian disaster — the Selkirk Grace seems rather appropriate, when we tuck into the haggis later today.