gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Didn’t it blow yesterday?

Two ppl are no longer alive today because of the wind that blew across Melbourne and the state in what sub-editors are calling ‘Wild Wednesday’.

It was pretty scary, from this correspondent’s point of view.

Mister Widget sent everyone home from the widget factory at a little after lunchtime, because the high possibility that the power would go out (again) at any moment made work impossible.

Widgeteers are too forgetful to remember to save their work all the time. Even when the power’s been out once already.

So i made it through the deadly roads – trees falling on all sides, small buildings rolling past like tumbleweeds – and bunkered down with Princess in the relative safety of our home.

We climbed under the kitchen table, tuned to Radio Melbourne 774, which is Melbourne’s disaster network, and listened to the apocalyptic reports coming in from across the state.

Radio presenter Richard Stubbs was just reflecting on the fact that, if you looked outside, things didn’t look too bad, when Radio Melbourne 774, Melbourne’s disaster network, went off the air.

Chilling.

Princess had intended to do some work with the poor that afternoon, and was about to head out onto the roads to assist in the distribution of charitable parcels to the down-at-heel, when i advised her that it would be best if she stayed off the roads, and that ppl were dying out there.

All afternoon sirens wailed and chainsaws buzzed as the bits of the world that blew down, fell over, or crashed into each other were put right.

I remember thinking (and i know this devalues the subject of this analogy somewhat, so i apologise in advance to anyone living in a war zone) that it was like what being in a metropolitan war zone must be like: life went on, but every now and then something blew up (or down), and then that part of life paused for a while.

The radio – when the station came back on – promised even more cataclysmic winds in the coming hours. Happily, they never eventuated. Not around here, anyway.

On the TV news, the anchor wanted to call the weather event a ‘phenomenon’. The weatherman said, smiling smugly, that it was unusual for the wind to blow that hard for that long, but that it wasn’t a true phenomenon.

Something like a phenomenon, then.

And then it was Wednesday night and we settled down to a repeat of House.