John sez: "Pretty wild up here in the highlands, but so far we've not had the amount of rain they seem to be getting further south."

Oddly, here just outside Bude we've also had very little rain, 3mm today to be precise. The wind has been pretty bad, but we've had worse many times in our 33 years in our remote house. We've had four weather insurance claims (none for anything else!), all wind-related, one in March 1987, then the Great Storm of October '87, then the Burns Day storm in 1990 (I could write a book...) and then two weeks after that in February 1990. All of those involved roof damage and two a demolished greenhouse. So OK for the last thirty years, in spite of many a big gale...

We've had two lightning strikes, not directly on the house thankfully, both of which struck our telephone line close to the house. One took out all our communications all over one Christmas and New Year and the other blew our wall-mounted phone right off the wall and across the kitchen floor and, scarily, melted and burned the telephone wires to our bedroom extension. Both burned out my computer modems. For several years we've had hardly any thunder and lightning at all, a very noticeable trend.