WEEK 4 - 23 January 2022
Glorious morning here; gales frolicking along the seashore but the view of the bay hasn’t blown away. Yet. What a night! No, not shades of grey, but the bedroom windows flexing in sonic booms. I checked at 3am that fighter-jets weren’t zipping across to Heysham. Not to mention a keening Kate Bush tribute, as sand whipped through double-glazing onto the window-sill courtesy of Storm Corrie. Ridiculous the fashion for anthropomorphising the increasing numbers of hurricanes, typhoons, etc. Even evil Disney isn’t powerful enough to quell Nature. She will run out of patience soon, stop scratching and obliterate human fleas once and for all.
I must go for a run – despite the (external) wind – apparently the bathroom scales are working perfectly. Panting along Yorkshire Street, I hear shouting. Someone is being threatened inside a closed-down shop, what’s more they’re elderly. Us OAPs must stick together! I‘ve requested a Taser for my birthday. I hammer on the decrepit shop door.
Eventually a nice young man opens it. He points to a theatre poster: it’s an Am Dram rehearsal for Steptoe & Son. NYM tries to flog me a ticket. I don’t need one – heard the whole play jogging from the Polish mini-mart on the corner.
Carl the builder, fearlessly and perfectly painting our vertiginous staircase, is listening to Tony Benn’s speeches on his head-phones. I ask him to put them on speaker.
Talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted! Storm walls have been erected across entrances all along the Promenade, now the weather’s back to normal. Dog-walkers on auto-pilot keep crashing into them. Bet it’s because Gove – the one who looks like a par-boiled pig, apologies to all decent*swine – has finally ‘approved’ Eden North. Boorish promptly cashes in: he’s whizzing up to Morecambe today. He cancelled a recent trip: a family member had Covid – is that a flying pig* over Ulverston? David Cameron likened his old mate to an oiled piglet; well, he would know.