Facing up to cyclone Friedhelm

Cyclone Friedhelm. Image from Wiki Commons

There have been warnings for days. Meteorologists have been tracking an unusually active kink in the polar front over the north Atlantic. Such extratropical cyclones, to give them their technical name, are commonplace. They are the dominant weather feature of our islands, bringing moisture laden air, brisk westerly winds and alternating cold and warm fronts in seemingly relentless strings. They queue up over the ocean, one behind another, waiting to dump their cargo of rain on our already sodden ground. But Cyclone Friedhelm is out of the ordinary, a once-in-a-decade storm.

Watching its progress on an animated meteorological chart is a sinister experience. It appears to snag on the southern tip of Greenland before breaking loose, heading south of Iceland and on a collision course for Scotland. All the while the depression is deepening. Isobars crowd thickly in ever decreasing circles, a black hole, a malevolent eye. I tap the barometer glass for the third or fourth time this morning and the needle jolts abruptly. Atmospheric pressure has dropped by more than twenty millibars in a matter of hours. In the fridge a bottle of sparkling water looks fit to burst.

Suck. Anish Kapoor's bottomless vortex.
at Jupiter Artland

Across the country schools and offices are closing as Scotland braces itself. A steep pressure gradient means wind, great howlings of wind that rampage around this profound puncture in the atmosphere. I liken it to one of those clever donation boxes you sometimes see in museums. Roll your pennies down the shute and watch them spiral faster and faster into the vortex before being gobbled up. And then I remember Suck, a disturbing piece of landscape art by Anish Kapoor. Suck is a great funnel in the ground, but sealed behind a cage so its bottom cannot be seen, only imagined. It may go on to the centre of the Earth, or forever.

On the east coast the worst will not arrive until dusk but already hailstones drill against the windows. Outside on the street the wind slides traffic cones like striped playing pieces on a giant game board. But Friedhelm is only limbering up. By lunchtime the news is reporting a gust of 101mph on the Tay Bridge adding, almost unnecessarily, that it has been closed to all traffic. The Aonach Mor ski centre boasts 130, but the prize goes to the Cairngorm Plateau clocking in at a frightening 165mph, not quite a record but close. Colloquially the Scots are calling it Hurricane Bawbag which, if you speak any Scots, you will know is hardly a term of endearment.

I cannot get to work, there are no trains. But I venture out and the assault is instant. Looking up the clouds are moving so fast it seems as if the triple steeples of St Mary's Cathedral are tumbling. The streets are strewn with cardboard and dead umbrellas. And then a new experience for me. For the first time in my life I am quite literally swept off my feet. Turning the corner I am taken from behind by a sudden squall and find myself dumped without dignity on the wet pavement. Unhurt, I can only laugh along with witnesses at the absurdity of it and think myself fortunate not to be on Aonach Mor or the Cairngorms.

Friedhelm, or Bawbag, rages well into the evening, roaring through the bare trees and punishing pedestrians with volleys of hail. By 10pm the worst is past and I pick my way home through a debris of roof slates and snapped branches. Mercifully it seems nobody has been seriously hurt, although there have been some lucky escapes from burst rivers farther south and there is temporary misery for those left without power. Next day the story is told in sequences of dramatic pictures on internet news sites: towering waves, wrecked wind turbines and the inevitable felled trees. Cyclone Friedhelm will be a storm talked about for a long while in Scotland, at least until the next one.

A thought for the trees

An unusually deep depression has swept across the northern British Isles today, unusual for this time of year at least. The time-lapse satellite images are beautiful to watch, an elegant spiral unwinding on a west to east trajectory, like the captivating pictures of distant galaxies or those mysterious traces left by sub-atomic particles spinning off from collisions in a nuclear accelerator.  The whorls of clouds look peaceful and just like the shots of galaxies and smashed atoms they give no sense of the mayhem being wreaked within. No wonder the spiral has been such a potent symbol throughout human history.

Winds have gusted at close to 100 miles per hour in exposed parts of Scotland, bringing a predictably dismal story of commuter chaos and disrupted power supplies. My own evening journey was several hours longer than usual and only made possible at all by the generosity of friends providing a relay of lifts. We arrived home tired and hungry but it was a temporary inconvenience which by tomorrow will be told of as an adventure.

It is the trees I feel saddest about. The streets and gardens are littered with shredded leaves and dismembered limbs. There are fractures and raw wounds everywhere. Many tired old specimens have been uprooted completely. Storms in winter, though often fiercer, tend to cause less damage. The trees are bare and the sap has retreated. A brittle branch may be sacrificed, snapped off to save the whole, but the body survives and repairs. By May even the late trees are in full leaf, weighed down with primavera foliage. Winds like today's may be too much for them to withstand.

Tomorrow, as train timetables get back to normal and television channels are restored, we should pay our respects to the lost trees. We can all bend only so far.