Will this Wind… ?
I’m worried about wind. Before you stop reading, fearing that I’m about to commit a gross act of oversharing, let me assure you I mean wind of the weather variety.
If I’m appropriately dressed I can cope with any kind of weather. I’ll – perhaps not happily, but at least stolidly – tramp for hours in the rain or the cold, but nothing makes me scuttle for the indoors faster than wind. I just can’t help taking it personally.
Perhaps it’s because of a humiliating incident from my student days, when I stepped out into a blustery North Wales day in my Notting Hill finery – a ludicrous floor-sweeping djellaba and bright blue lace-up boots – only to have the cloak fabric whipped round my legs where it caught on the boot hooks, leaving literally hobbled. But that’s only one occasion, you say. Well how is it that whenever I come to the end of a spell of reluctant gardening and try to sweep up leaves and clippings, gusts swirl in from nowhere to disperse them all?
‘Will this wind be so mighty as to lay low the mountains of the aaaarrrrttthh?’ asked the deluded endtimers in the Beyond the Fringe comedy sketch, their jumpers pulled over their heads to signal their general medieval bonkersness. ’Nearly’ seemed to be the answer in October 1987, at least down south, when I remember the whole family, baby and all, cowering in bed and listening to the fury outside, then emerging to find the landscape physically changed. (But, as Victoria Wood noted at the time, Margaret Thatcher’s hair had remained strangely unmoved.) Then the wind died down, trees regenerated of their own accord, and the world moved on.
What would a world in which the wind never died down be like? Novelist Sarah Hall imagined it brilliantly in her short story ‘Then Later, His Ghost’:* the constant roar, the difficulty of moving around – our hero has to tape his sleeves and trouser legs rightly at the cuffs and walk into town holding on to guide ropes he has painstakingly installed along the route – and the absence of new food crops as seeds and blossoms are dispersed before growth can occur. Terrifying.
According to an article published in Scientific American in 2019, wind speeds are getting faster across the globe: the average wind speed rose from 7mph to 7.4mph in less than ten years, after slowing down for several decades up to 2010. Various causes have been suggested, including temperature differences between neighbouring regions, or between the sea and the adjacent land. Climate change also seems to have affected the behaviour of the jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere.
So where can I take refuge? Certainly not in Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica, where the average annual windspeed is more than 50mph – and these are not just any old winds, they are karabatic winds, produced by cold air flowing down slopes. Brrrr. Sadly, though, Antarctica is also home to the least windy place on earth: Ridge A, at 4,053 metres above sea level, has the lowest wind speeds on the planet. Perhaps I should just settle for St Albans, the stillest city in the UK.
Meanwhile, the icy blasts of this spring continue. What will next month bring? Nothing good, if Shakespeare is anything to go by: ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May… ’
*Apologies: this is behind a paywall.