David Gillon

So with Hurricane/ex-Hurricane/Maybe-Still- a-Hurricane-but-predicted-to-be-a-Tropical-Storm-Real-Soon-Now Ophelia  due to hit the British Isles tomorrow I thought I'd better finish off the re-roofing of the garden shed - I replaced the felt over the summer, but never got around to replacing the battens on the gable ends, which are an extra protection against the wind getting underneath and ballooning the felt off. Surprisingly this only took me 20 minutes, but I had a smile on my face when I realised this literally amounted to 'battening down the hatches', even if I was doing it to a roof, not a hatchway..

I'm not actually expecting trouble tomorrow, there isn't even a severe weather warning for the south east as far as I can see, Ophelia's due to hit entirely the other side of the country, in fact entirely the other side of the next country over, but it needed doing before we get much further into autumn, so it's a good excuse.

Of course the problem with leaving it until the last minute and then deciding to do it is I hadn't gotten around to painting/weatherproofing  the wood, and I do want to do every side, not just the exposed ones, because the wood I'm replacing had rotted from the back. So it's all going to have to come off again for a quick paint job once the winds have died down.

Adding to people's concern is that it's 30 years since the 1987 Great Storm, which did hit the South East. There were multiple trees down at the end of my road, one of them on top of a friend's car (though I didn't know her then), but I managed to sleep completely through it, bar the five minutes at god-awful o'clock in the morning when I stumbled downstairs to slam the front door, which had been blown open. I'll settle for sleeping through Ophelia as well.