"Don't worry, it's not..."

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

So said BBC TV weatherman Michael Fish 37 years ago today, in response to a caller to the station who'd enquired about French weather warnings that a hurricane was on its way.

Of course it was on its way and if, like me, you lived in East Kent you were in for a hell of a night. I woke at around 2am - the power was already off, and the noise! The continuous booming roar of the wind was beyond my sleep-addled, teenage comprehension, to the extent that my first thought was that a nuclear bomb had been dropped close by and this was the shockwave. I know, I know, but I couldn't understand what else would have the power to shake the house like that, and Glasnost was still a couple of years away, after all.

The next morning I discovered a hole in the outside of my bedroom wall, where a roof tile from next door had blown across two driveways and embedded itself in our pebbledash. I also spent some time gathering the remains of our greenhouse, which was in bits all over the garden, before exploring the neighbouring hospital, the hill-top wooded grounds of which were decimated. A particularly massive beech tree had gone over on the print shop, completely destroying it, as I recall. My dad worked at the hospital and had walked to work in pitch darkness at 5am, clambering over fallen trees to get there. He also tells the tale of dodging empty milk bottles as the wind picked them up and blew them horizontally across a yard, like little glass missiles.

I'm not going to embed the Michael Fish clip - we've all seen it before, and it seems very harsh on him. But here he (sort of) is a year later, immortalised in song with a clutch of his meteorological mates. With bonus Wogan content!

By the way, A Tribe of Toffs didn't get the Christmas Number One, in the end, despite the appearance on primetime Wogan - this peaked at 21.