Together we await the winds

Ironically, the grimmer the news, the more it pulls us together and strengthens the community. By now most of us in the UK are aware of the wild storms forecast to hit our watery little islands on or around Sunday night. Street by road by lane, across the cities, towns and villages of Britain, we watch the latest on our TV sets, tune in to our radios, click on our computer updates, and hold our breath. Each of us, hurrying home from work or nipping to the letterbox or just popping outside with the bins, stops a moment to look, listen, feel, to think ahead, to plan. Together we anticipate.

Before today's hi-tech weather predictions and communication systems, people had none such advanced warning to heed, of course, nor to share. They shared a myriad other things that we don't; their communities did not need such dramas to pull them together. Nevertheless, there is something unique and momentous about this feature of 21st century life that offers a few drops of compensation for such losses, and in a way our ancestors could never have envisaged.

While I, safe within my four walls, here in south Wales, listen to the first low sighs and whimpers of this approaching gale, for instance, I know that my friends and relatives and acquaintances and colleagues will be doing the same - every one of them - in odd moments, around my village, up in the Welsh valleys, over the Severn Bridge and up through the Midlands, and down through the west country, too, and across in the hubbub of London, and over in the flat, exposed east, and up round the coast to shivery Newcastle. I know that they, too, will have stopped to focus a moment on at least one of those very same maps and charts and arrows and bars and warnings and updates and comments that have caught my eye. It's a safe bet, too, that as the storm strengthens and its sighs rise to howls, the phone wires will start rattling, texts flying, emails shooting here, there and everywhere: from all round the country, our individual four-walled sanctuaries will be converging under one swaying, battered umbrella, as we check up on each other, swap notes, laugh, sigh, gasp, console. For the duration of the storm, from its first prediction to the last reporting of its aftermath, it will hold our fragmented existences together in its power: not unlike Hallowe'en, I suppose...

unless the forecast turns out to be wrong, which would be good news all round, of course, except for that momentary, invisible, intangible, ephemeral little community pull.