Storm Darragh certainly arrived here with a bang, and the red warnings were not exaggerated as it was certainly the fiercest storm we’ve had here in a few years.

Thankfully we were some of the lucky ones who didn’t lose power, bar a few blips during the night which was only discovered early Saturday morning when the timed heating failed to warm up my farm clothes before braving the outside world.

Toasty trousers and socks are certainly one thing that we seem to take for granted in modern life when the wind is blowing a hooley outdoors and your bed is the warmest and cosiest place to be.

Elsewhere on the farm there was little damage, though daddy had the foresight to prop one shed door with a fencepost, it having been warped a couple of years ago after getting blown in with a previous storm and would have been further damaged if there wasn’t a backup option to aid it against the wind.

Surprisingly our old hayshed and byre suffered no ill effects, but a newer fence post came a cropper, allowing a gate to swing on to a road, though luckily this was discovered early in the morning on the way to feed cattle and propped in place to ride out the rest of the squalls in safety.

On a rather blustery but dry day afterwards a walk was undertaken to see if any damage had occurred in the locality, and it’s funny how my eyes could immediately pick out a place in the distance where a chimney and gable of a house was now visible due to a fallen tree.

I suppose that’s what over 30 years of walking the same route will do, whether we realise it or not our brains have a recollection of the landscape as it has remained for many years.

Silly

Surprisingly I didn’t knock that bit of information out of my head at the beginning of the month as I did a rather silly thing late one evening in the shed. I don’t always use a flashlight, which is a bad habit to get into but at this stage I know my way around the shed like the back of my hand.

Although I must have been wearing gloves that night, as I wasn’t paying attention on my way out of the feeding area and walked slap bang into the edge of the scoop on the front loader where I learned that head wounds do indeed bleed rather profusely, along with leaving what looks like a nice scar to remind me about paying attention when walking around in near darkness.

Unfortunately the mice around here seem to have an excellent memory of the old stone walled cottage I live in and moved in either before or just after the undesirable weather.

With many years of experience catching them, there’s no chair needed to stand on while I flap an apron in their general direction. Instead, the cat was deployed and in spite of his one-eyed disability, he made short work of three little pests.

While there are a few running amok in the shed, especially around the hay bales, the calf feed is being stored in our old milk tanker which makes it inaccessible for any rodent, unless they feel up to skydiving off the tractor through the two small missing lids.

Though they’ll be invariably scooped up and disposed of afterwards, what a way to go if you’re a mouse.