It was indeed, a long weekend these past few days, not that that is a bad thing you understand, even though it wasn’t long by choice. The weather had a lot to do with it, although from my perspective it had no right to. More of that later though since it started on … well Friday as it happens. Imagine a wavy cut-scene…
So anyway, Louise has been sick. On Friday she wasn’t up to going out to an Ingress event in Greenwich, and to be completely honest, it didn’t take a lot to convince me it was too far either. We ended up going to BrewDog for a few quick beers and a cheeseburger with a friend instead. That is to say we met the friend and ate the cheeseburgers, before anyone gets the wrong idea. We weren’t too late, which is always good.
Saturday was supposed to be more events, including an Ingress event in Hyde Park and Transpose at ULU, which we also managed to miss. We did however have a lovely time eating cheese, drinking beers and playing games. I can’t say we made the best choice but we had fun. I’ve recently got addicted to RIFT™, and was levelling up one of my characters there, while Louise was switching between KSP and Euro Truck Simulator on her laptop.
We went out for lunch as usual on Sunday, though we didn’t stay at the Wetherspoons after eating this time. Instead we crossed the road to the Holborn Whippet for some tasty Lagunitas IPA “from the brick“. It was, as usual, most nommy. However, since the wind was starting to pick up and the forecast was pretty bad, we headed home to where it was warm, cozy and save from the weather… 19 floors up.
Sunday night came and went, merging quietly into Monday morning, with the only confusion being a clock on the wall that I hadn’t reset following the government mandated time travel of Sunday morning. It was a little grey outside, but we couldn’t hear the wind much outside which meant the storm obviously hadn’t reached us, and so checking the trains to Cambridge, Louise discovered that the storm had knocked out the rail networks. We looked out and by now the sky was blue. I looked down from the kitchen at Euston Station, and trains seemed to be running ok. The internet and the news were telling us otherwise! On twitter, some photos of downed trees were circulating, and fair enough, some were on railway lines. The rail companies said they were being fixed, though the same photos showed up 4 or 5 hours later on the BBC, long after they were sorted out, as headlines.
Basically, apart from Louise being unable to get to work in Cambridge, we were unaffected by the storms. The news said thousands of homes were without power – and strangely Sky News was broadcasting advice on what to do if you had no power, though how you’d be able to view it without power is beyond me. And of course, there were casualties, so it was not all jokes about media grandstanding. In any case, bad as it was, back in Wales we’d have called it a normal autumnal day. I used to live there, and I know.