On Saturday No show on Earth is more dramatic...

KEEP your hair on! That’s what someone shouted as we stood on the 1,400ft ridge above our village this week. At my age I’m lucky to have hair, but the old follicles were having a job hanging on in the gale which was being hurled our way by someone with a curious Irish name.

I refer to Storm Ciarán, of course. He who blew loud and long on Thursday. But not quite as loud or long as we may have feared, thank God.

People can lose their lives in a storm, so gales are not a subject to be treated lightly. And yet there is, for many of us, a sense of anticipation which lurks somewhere (preferably by a cosy fireside) when we hear dire weather warnings from the Met Office.

How do you describe that emotional mix of intrigue and foreboding which occurs as you set about battening down of hatches? Maybe it’s a kind of low-level thrill similar to the anticipation people experience when they’re about to ride on a roller-coaster.

Of course, if you’ve got anything serious to be doing when a storm is coming your way, you’ll regard this notion as childish in the extreme. I can’t imagine many Cornish trawlercrews were feeling thrilled as they steamed for cover earlier this week. Indeed, Storm Ciarán must have considerably inconvenienced anyone who had any kind of travelling or outdoor work to be doing.

It was just before Ciarán struck that I heard the first hint of the gale. I was lighting the log fire and, down the chimney, I could hear that strange low moaning which unusually high winds make. You hear it in our deep valley when a gale hits the surrounding hills – and for me the reverberating base-note caused that familiar, instinctive, stirring of the pulse. It remained as I went around the place looking for candles and putting various torches and battery powered radios on charge. I felt it an hour later as I continued in powercut-mode and put a casserole in the wood-fired oven.

But that’s just me. Perhaps most people simply shrug at the idea of amber weather warnings, let alone take an interest in day-to-day meteorological reports. I say that because my favourite source of news, the BBC Today programme, managed to squeeze its all-important 8am weather forecast down to a single minute on Thursday – even though the south of the nation was being hit by the worst storm in 37 years.

Maybe they’re right – perhaps grilling politicians is more important than what’s coming out of the skies. It probably is in London where BBC presenters are ferried to and from home in chauffeur-driven cars. City life in general is not as open to the elements as country life. But for many of the millions of people living outside the M25 – from farmers and fishermen to dog-walkers – news of the weather can be a very important thing indeed.

There’s a corner in our valley which always catches the worst of the West wind, and its trees were already beginning to groan on Wednesday evening. I was in no mood to hang about as I walked the dog up there. Being in that neck of the woods just a few hours later would have been suicidal. The tall conifers on that slope can fall like nine-pins in a gale – the area is littered with timber carcasses from the last big blow.

As a newspaper journalist I have written about casualties in storms. Indeed, once long ago when I was a radio reporter, I was one of the first on the scene after high winds had caused the death of a pub landlady. It was a sad and horrible story I shall never forget. So, no… I don’t hang about – I take the power of the wind very seriously.

Having said that, for some reason I do still feel a sense of helpless fascination when the Met Office is warning of some freak weather event, whether it’s a gale, a blizzard or a heatwave… and, judging by what I see on social media, a good number of other people feel the same way. It’s more to do with anticipation than exhilaration, but there’s an element of highly muted and reluctant excitement in it nevertheless.

I suppose anything unusual that’s going to affect us all is bound to create emotions of some kind. When it comes to big storms it’s about the power of nature. We feel awed. It’s almost as though we need reminding that we humans are nothing but small and rather weedy apes in the greater scheme of things. The fact that, collectively, we are managing to alter the planet’s weather systems is almost too frightening to consider. That’s a bad kind of fear. Perhaps a good dose of fear is one that you experience simply by witnessing what Mother Nature can do all on her own, without any help from us or our boundless technology.

Which is, perhaps, why so many people go wave-watching during a storm despite the Coastguard warnings. And why TV news loves to show the huge white plumes of spray bouncing off places like Porthleven.

No show on Earth is more dramatic than the one nature can stage. Which is fantastic – as long as you manage to stay safe out there, and keep your hair on.

‘It’s almost as though we need reminding that we humans are nothing but small and rather weedy apes’