Perishing phone line

So, where was I? Right here, but without a telephone or internet. The photos* tell it all, really, so if you prefer, you can just Marvel and Wonder at the narrow escape my family had – any closer and they would have had to move in with me and realise the more interesting aspects of Living With Z. Al knows all about it of course; many years ago he took the photo of Mum’s kitchen all round New Zealand to remind him of home (get it at the right angle and all you can see is chaos) but his wife and children only get hints of my version of home comforts.

I had just sat down to tell you about Bananaman, when I became aware that the wind had strengthened and there was, suddenly, a gale blowing outside. Then I heard a ‘thwumph’. It was not a loud noise, but it was wrong. I jumped up, calling to the Sage that something had blown down and grabbed a coat and a torch.

The gap was the first thing I noticed. The absence of tree. The pine tree outside Al and Dilly’s bungalow was missing. Instead, there was a large hole in the ground and a large tree on its side in their garden. The sound I heard must have been the roots tearing themselves out of the ground and the swish of the fall. There was no crash. It touched and broke the corner tiles of the bungalow and tore off the soffit board. It landed on sticking-out branch stumps, having had its fall broken at the last by the garden roller. Because of these stumps, it is balanced above, rather than on, the row of flower tubs on the patio. The light on the corner of the bungalow was still alight.

I went indoors to tell Dilly and stayed with the children while she went to look – by this time, the rain had stopped and the wind had died down. I explained to Squiffany what had happened and we went to look out of the window. “Tree, huge, in garden. Leaves, tree, HUGE. Dark. Wet.” she said, accurately.

Our good and useful friend Jamie came round the next morning with his chainsaw and we spent the best part of three hours cutting up the tree (a good section of trunk has been left in one piece and will, in due course, be Useful Timber for floorboards or whatever. No resin at all came out of the trunk so the logs will, when dried out for a year or two, go in the woodburner.

However, we couldn't do anything about the phone line.. Theirs was broken and ours didn’t work. It being a Bank Holiday weekend and a stormy one too, it took until today for an engineer to come round. I did pop down to the local internet café on Tuesday (one computer in the back room of the computer shop, with the chair too low and the monitor too high) to check emails, but I couldn’t blog from there, it didn’t feel right.

I’ll tell you about Bananaman another time.

*whenever Blogger lets me upload them.