On the radio they are saying the gale-force winds we’ve had today are common for this time of year. They don’t even seem to be surprised by the tornadoes. Apparently it happened exactly eleven years ago, too, on Burns night, and back then it was more destructive than the storm Michael Fish promised the nation was a figment of one of his viewers’ imagination just before it came and ripped up half the trees in the country.

Roofs torn off, tiles shattered. That kind of stuff. Lots of rain that I had to brave to go out and collect a large parcel that Citylink’s web site assures me I was missed when I was out at work. Apparently they dropped a card through my door, but I never got it.

They all seemed to know my box when I arrived. ‘Ah,’ said the drawn and balding guy at the counter. I was standing as far as I could from the propped-open door but the rain was still catching my shoes and the hems of my jeans. ‘I know that one.’ He then called over his friend to tell him that the guy from my road (ie me) had arrived for his parcel. Quite what it was that made it stand out in their mind I don’t know. Perhaps they’d had a nasty experience when they’d tried to deliver it. Perhaps that explains the missing card.

It was fifty blank CDs, some memory and a card reader, so in light of peoples’ roofs being ripped off and their belongings destroyed I sat down and started to archive the contents of my hard drives onto the CDs.

What a tedious process. My drive is old old old. A veteran of several home-built PCs, it’s 2-speed, when most of the developed world is running 32-speed drives or faster. It took almost seven hours to do seven discs, using the clunky built-in busning software in Windows XP. Nero couldn’t even find my drive, let alone tell what it was, or else I would have used that.

Time I upgraded, I think.

Still, my photos are now stored safely on a series of discs, and I’m almost tempted to make another set of copies to store away at work or at mum’s to cater for worst-case scenarios.

Dinner this evening with Trevor and Jon. Veg lasagne followed by Christmas pudding. Yum.

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