The Wind

I know from speaking to the staff at my son's before-and-after school club that young children get agitated when the wind blows. The staff live in terror of windy days; they say that the kids start climbing the walls. Animals are bothered by the wind, too. Cats and dogs go slightly crazy during blustery weather.

I live in a big old Victorian house. It stretches over four floors, including the converted roof space and the cellar. This week the wind has been insane. It's been blowing a hooligan. This evening I discovered that the wind is so strong it's been blowing sheets of rain against the front of the house, and the rain has been sluicing down the brickwork, pouring off the stone window sill and flooding into the cellar, causing water to pool on the floor. Something else that's going to need fixing in spring, along with the dodgy electrics and the leaky roof.

But the wind has a strange effect on me, too. Rather than wind me up, like those young kids and house pets, it often brings on a bout of my depression. I sit downstairs late at night and I listen to the walls and the windows being battered by the gales, and I hear the wind groaning and whistling through the gaps around the old wooden front door. Wheelybins are blown along the street. The telephone wires whip and thrum in the air between the houses. It terrifies my eight year-old son - tonight, he's sleeping in with us, for comfort - but it doesn't scare me. It makes me feel lost and empty, like sad music.

Maybe I'm scared that the wind will get inside the house and blow me away? Or that it'll get inside me. Sometimes I think that might be a good thing. It might lift me up and take me somewhere different, where the wind is a mournful goddess and the weather is always crazy...a place where anything can happen.