Garden Furniture And Patio Furniture

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Here on the mountain it can get windy.  VERY windy.  Weirdly if you talk to anyone in the UK about Spain all that seems to get mentioned is sun, sea and sangria.  When you talk to anyone in Spain though they admit to the rather severe wind.  Spain it seems is one of the windiest parts of Europe but for some reason tourists never tell their friends back home.  The wind in Spain is like some grand secret that may never be mentioned.  We live high up so expect to get battered by the elements but its equally stormy lower down at times.

WHERE DID IT GO?

If you stay long in Spain, wherever you are,  you  probably see some pretty insane wind at times.  We get wind so strong it has even knocked over our large petrol cement mixer.  A particularly annoying incident as yours truly had that day decided to leave the mixer next to a giant hole at the end of a terrace we were slowly filling with rubble.  Big D was a tad cross the next day as we struggled to get the mixer back up onto the ground.  Friends just yonder have even witnessed tea cyclone out of cups in the wind.

During our first year here we regularly lost watering cans, buckets, cement bags and even 240 litre water butts (though admittedly never full ones).  By year two I was a wind obsessed paranoid freak who never left an empty bucket or indeed anything plastic outside without ensuring it was seriously weighed down.  By now, I thought I’d relaxed – ensuring watering cans are never empty, anything light is always stacked with something heavy wedging it in place  and the compost heap tarp is always weighed down with many bricks and bits of wood were just automatic.

OH THERE IT IS!

Yesterday however we were, once again surprised by the severity of the wind.  Yesterday, by the way was a georgeous balmy 21 degrees.  It was a really nice day but there were some mad gusts of wind (hot wind which is equally bizarre for January).  Well in the afternoon D popped into the house to ask if I knew about the horizontal olive tree.  I did not know about this or indeed what D was talking about.  A little later on I popped outside to warm up (it really was that warm, and equally it really was still a bit nippy in the ‘big room with the internet connection’).  I can’t believe it.  What was a very healthy looking olive tree has snapped in the wind!  It wasn’t a particularly old tree (not a millennium olive like many other expats like to believe in) or indeed a particularly young tree.  Neither was it one of those ridiculously precarious trees hanging onto a collapsed piece of terrace (we have many of this sort as terrace repairing is slow and hard).  No this was a perfectly happy, decent sized tree covered in olives (yes we still have to pick all our olives for oil processing at the village co-operativa).

So the loss of a happy looking tree unnerved me a little.  Followed by the weather widgetty thing showing a hurricane type symbol for today (never seen this symbol before) with the note ‘very windy’ got me thinking we might have ‘some weather’ today.  Then the BBC weather man (yes I know, but it was Friday night and sometimes a slob in front of dodgy UK tv is fun) said the ‘storm of the decade’ was heading towards the Bay of Biscay’.  I have to tell you I actually moved the car!  Just to be on the safe-side as its a rather cubist old Suzuki which has not even heard of aero-dynamics, and it was parked next to a tree on the edge of a terrace.  Now its in the proper car-parking zone on a flat bit surrounded by trees.  If the wind really does get that bad (TV3 our local Catalan tv station indicates the wind will be a number 10 which we’ve only seen once before) the car may get covered in fallen trees but at least it has nowhere itself to fall!

So today I’m feeling a bit paranoid about the wind which as I type is making pretty scary noises round the house.  It doesn’t help that we have the biggest pine tree on our bit of mountain right outside the front door.

But hey ho I’m a Brit so at heart I love the weather, thinking about it, preparing for it, talking about it, and now, writing about it!

Hope the air is still wherever you are!