Blimey… that is the second hurricane in two years.
It is also the second hurricane in two years to pretty much miss St. Céré. Miss or not, it was one hell of a blow and I expected to wake to missing roof tiles (if not roofs!) in our little hamlet on the hill… but not a tile out of place, nor a tree down anywhere. Phew. Begining to get confidence in the work I did on the extension roof.
You know how it is… you hire a professional and pay through the nose just so you can phone him if it goes wrong. But then you watch said professional and you think to yourself… “Now that is not rocket science. I reckon I could do that”… or thoughts to that effect. So next time the task comes around, you are up there slinging battens and tiles around like, well, like a professional. But then…
When the wind blows, you know there will be no-one to phone. Worse, you lie awake waiting for the crash and that feeling of aprehension about the quality of your work is only just dissipated come the morning when you see said work has held.
Until the next hurricane. And that is the point of this particular blog. Nobody said anything about hurricanes when we decided to move to the middle of sunny south west France! Not ever! Look, this is not the Caribbean, for heavens sake. Why, it is not even hurricane season. And yet, here we are, with 50 dead and chaos and mayhem up and down the Atlantic coast.
Time was, we used to blame the Russians for this sort of thing. But now who? I’m going to have to think about that one. Right now, I am just glad we chose St. Céré and the deepest Lot. Just about as far away from any sea as you can get in France. Med one way, 4.5hrs. Atlantic the other way, 5 hrs. Mind you, that’s by car. By hurricane it would be about 20 mins, give or take!
I would be grateful to any of you met bods/climatologists out there if you could explain why I might just be the first person in St. Céré to build a storm bunker under the barn.
In the meantime… anyone need their roof re-doing?
