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Weather Watching
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As storm Éowyn blows outside, I’m reminded of my childhood. I grew up out in the sticks, surrounded by a forestry plantation, no neighbours for a mile radius. Weather was palpable, not some abstract set of symbols you watched on a TV forecast. You watched (or, more likely, listened to) the forecast, but you also watched the sky. You paid attention to what you felt, and took action. It was a lesson learnt through experience - we moved there when I was one, and no sooner had we got there than the water supply froze. With the pipe from well to house buried in permafrost, we spent a winter without water. After that, we knew to leave a tap running overnight if skies were clear in winter, and to put a hot water bottle on the pump if the forecast was really cold (-10°C or less was not particularly unusual). A few years later there was a summer without water, when the well dried up - I remember a whole series of siphoning efforts used to try and transfer water from one place to another in an effort to keep vegetables and chickens hydrated. And then there were the gales. Great thunderous winds that would slam into the side of the house, rattle the slates off the roof, and rip through the forest. In the morning, you’d head outside to survey the damage, and chase down windblown items that had escaped being pinned down in advance.
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The infamous hurricane of 1987 transformed the woods around me. These were woods that I knew like the back of my hand, yet with root balls and fallen trees everywhere, we actually got a bit lost. A whole section of the forest was so mangled that it had to be clear-felled. 1988 was spent building dens in the piles of fir tree branches which were left behind. I remember these branches as being pretty huge, often taking three of us kids to manoeuvre them into place. With careful selection, you could make a kind of fir-tree-branch igloo, a doorway left at the front to crawl into, the daylight blocked by the dense layers of branches around us. Stripped from the trunks, the branches started to lose their needles, but we collected some sort of creeping weed that bloomed everywhere and planted it on the dens, keeping the igloos pretty dry on the inside and green (and cunningly disguised from imaginary foes) on the outside. We made plans to sleep in them, though - to my regret - we never did.
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What does this have to do with bikes? Absolutely nothing - though we did ride them, it was only as transport. While we did race home down the rough cobbled forest track as fast as we could, it never occurred to us to take our bikes into the woods, or to try building jumps. In a pre-internet age - heck, TV channels didn’t even run for 24 hours - we didn’t know that mountain biking was being born. We didn’t go to sweet shops or the newsagent, where we might have caught sight of a magazine with someone pulling a wheelie on the cover. I don’t recall any of us ever trying to wheelie, or even knowing that they existed. Riding without our hands on the bars, or just going as fast as we possibly could, was the full extent of our ‘stunt’ repertoire.
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We might not have known mountain biking, but we did know the outdoors. We climbed trees, built dens and dams, netted minnows, played dare in squelchy bogs. We raced dark clouds home, or to the shelter of a tree, and pulled down hats and zipped up coats against the wind. We rarely wore anything on our feet except wellies.
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Tucked up warm inside my centrally heated, mains connected, suburban estate house, I’m not going to pretend that it was all a golden age. The modern world has many comforts, and in many ways my 1980s childhood was stuck in a ‘60s or ‘70s timewarp. But I do think it was an existence that made me feel especially in touch with the landscape around me, aware of the changes of seasons and weather. Aside from the odd school closure and cancelled ballet class, I wonder how many of today’s kids will really notice storm Éowyn? How many hear the wind buffeting the house and wonder what will lie in wait for them outside once it passes? I hope that at least some of them will think to build a den. If they ask you if they can sleep in it, make it happen.
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