Boss Radio

Today I actually experienced the phenomena of sound being carried by the wind. Previously I've heard parties and late night gigs wafting in and out as the breeze speang up and down, but today I was on my way to the news rack and a freezing wind was billowing down from the Actic.

And I heard a woman speaking behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure I hadn't missed something. I hadn't passed anyone of the fairer sex so who was this person? There was no one there. I walked on a few yards and she spoke again.

This time, at the risk of seeming rude, I stopped and turned around. There was no one there, not in any gardens, not on the road, not even sitting in a car. Mystified I turned back and took a few more steps, and then I saw her. She was standing talking to a friend between two parked cars about 10 yards in front of me, yet even though I could now see her speaking my brain had difficulty in linking the sounds, which were quite distinctly coming from behind me, to the movement of her lips.

It was the same kind of confusion that I felt the first time I saw the roads illuminated by yellow light and nothing was the colour I knew it to be.

My brain hurts...

After billowing in from the South for months now, the wind changed its mind today and blew across the back of our gardens from West to East, at which point I realised that I had blundered.

The roof on the shed at the bottom of the garden had caved in after one too many oiks from the houses on the other side tried to walk across it, so we replaced it with corrugated plastic. No one, we reasoned, would be dim enough to try and walk across that, and we were right. Well, one out of two ain't bad.

When it came to overlapping the corrugations we decided it didn't matter which way the overlap went. We'd started from over there so the overlap would naturally fall over there. Bad move. If I'd thought about it for more than half a nanosecond I'd have realised that when the wind blows across the backs of the gardens it always goes thataway. There's a hill in the way to prevent it from coming from the opposite direction. And as you've guessed I'd put the overlaps facing into the wind.

I first realised this when I saw one of the mid sections of the roof rising up into the wind, I charged out and put a couple of bricks on it. 'That'll hold it until I can get out and do a proper job' I thought, meaning 'That'll hold it until that damn wind goes down a bit and it's a little less goolie-shredding out there'. I went back in and realised that I'd rushed out leaving the toast toasting under the grill. It was now charcoal. I ate it anyway, just to teach myself a lesson. Oh well. One out of three ain't bad.

As I ate I glanced out of the window, just in time to see the mid section rearing up again. Back out like a bolt of lightning (Slow lightning, you may have heard of it) and before I knew it there I was wrestling with a furshlugginer chunk of corrugated plastic which was by now only held on by one stuborn screw, and seemed determinded to learn the shimmy in one easy lesson. At least it had stopped raining, or to be more precise the wind was blowing so hard that the rain couldn't reach ground.

Finally the wind died down a bit and I managed to tear up a little of the adjoining roof and slip the recalcitrant piece under it so that it was now overlapping the right way.

It was about this time that I noticed that the aforementioned neighbouring peice of roof was also only held on by a couple of screws. Down the ladder once more, where's that piece of wood I had lying around? I found it resting against the shed where I would swear on a stack of Bibles I hadn't left it and hoisted it onto the roof to hold the lot down, but still it kept defiantly trying to rear up, so - I'm back down the ladder again and collecting some more bricks to lay them across the plank. That did it, but the far end of the roof was now starting to flap a little where it overlapped the shed, and I knew it wasn't going to hold much longer if my past record was anything to go by. Down the ladder again, find another plank, more bricks... And finally it held out until the wind dropped.

Meanwhile I suddenly remembered that I'd put the binbags out the night before and rushed out to the front expecting them to be blown all over the road. But they weren't, the only thing missing was the paper, glass, and tin recycling box. There was one resting against a car about 50 yards up the hill on the wrong side of the road, I went to look, yup, that's the one, so there I was carrying it back down the road and I noticed a light flashing. It was a street light. The protective cover had blown off and was swinging crazily about in the breeze. 'Whoops,' I thought. 'Better get inside and 'phone the council before that thing does some damage or hurts someone'. I'd reached the house when I suddenly realised that it was my vehicle parked under that light. I turned to look back up the road just in time to see the cover break free with a final grand pirouette and land on my roofrack, bounce off it, hit my wingmirror, and finally let the pavement break its fall.

Oh well. One out of four ain't bad.