Wind in the Willows

Yes, it was one of my favourite books as a boy, but in this case the title refers to this mad weather we've had today. 90mph winds? What's that all about? My colleague Steve called me up this morning to complain that he was going to be late for his meeting - the train was restricted to 50mph because of the wind. He had even more to worry about later - he and Nic were stuck at Euston after their trains home were cancelled altogether. There were so many fallen trees and branches on the lines they weren't safe. I've been working side-by-side with these guys for months and that could easily have been me.

Our firm issued a bulletin later in the afternoon containing a list of closed roads as long as your arm, but by the time it came out I was already stuck in a queue on the A5103 bringing Nikki back from work. We didn't know at the time, but the queue was caused by a fallen tree completely blocking both sides of the dual carriageway. Someone sent this photo into the BBC News pages:

We sat stationary in the queue for almost fifteen minutes. Luckily we were just south of the M60 interchange so we were able to swing left onto the motorway and come home via Sale and Stretford, but even so it took us over an hour and a half to get home (a journey that usually takes little more than 10 minutes). Every road we tried was blocked with creeping traffic so in the end we decided we may as well stick it out. Found out later that it was a good job I didn't try Palatine Road as an alternative route home - there was a fallen tree there too and we would have had no escape if we'd been trapped on that road.

We're grateful that 90 minutes was not all we lost. The number of people killed is still climbing and not far from us the entire corner of a house has been taken out by another tree, so things could have been a lot worse. 40,000 people are without power tonight and many more have been injured, whereas the worst we had to do was stand the wheelie bins back up.