07 December 2006

Me And My Big Mouth

Not much more than a week ago, I cavalierly intoned that "we don't usually get tornadoes here in the UK." Cut to this morning, when a tornado touched down in Kensal Rise, about a mile, if that, from my house. It was a relatively restrained, English sort of tornado, unleashing nowhere near the sort of havoc one expects to see when a twister slams through a trailer park in the Southern United States, but as you can see from these pictures, not the sort of thing you'd want dropping in on your happy home. If there's a silver lining to this particular storm cloud, it's that I once, about ten years ago, seriously considered moving to Kensal Rise, then being touted as the new up and coming neighbourhood. Fortunately, Olivia put her foot down and said there was no way she would countenance moving to "that dreadful, dreary place." Considering that KR has been "up and coming" for at least a decade now without having come up very far at all, and that it's still plagued with muggings, murders and, now, tornadoes, I'd have to say Olivia did me a rather large favour.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heard about this in school today - very bored lunchtime thus i was left to peruse the pages on the internet that arent blocked by the school system. Surprising how many people from where i live in West London, have connections to Kensal Rise and the particular path of the tornado.

Times are changing with British weather (or its extremes at least), first Birmingham now Kensal Rise.

Anonymous said...

You're in London! Avoiding tornadoes! I thought you were meant to be in NY, doing, well, whatever.
Me and Shely had a walk on Sunday - you could have come if we'd known!
R

Jersey Beat Podcast said...

You were, in fact, the first person I thought of when I saw the report on the evening news (yes, the tornado did make the news here in the Colonies.) Glad to hear you survived intact!