It’s late at night. There have been storms. A pine tree outside my back window was struck by lightning. It’s a big tree, a high as a four or five story building. I want to build a tree house towards the top, and use it to observe comet showers. The lightning hit about two thirds of the way up the tree, and big, thick, hard scars of bark exploded in all directions: in the pool, all over the lawn, onto the balcony where I have breakfast when it’s warm enough.

The tree caught alight, with great yellow-red gouts of flame, but fortunately it was raining so hard that it soon put the fire out. But you could smell it smouldering for a day or two. 

I’d dealt with that, and then on Wednesday night there was a wind storm. The gale howled as if someone was trying to push the Arctic through power pylons: that humming of wire and shrilling of air, the coldest sound on earth. I fell deeply asleep, since it’s good to be warm when that is happening. But in the morning, a huge oak had split in half, and the half that fell had landed, spectacularly, in the swimming pool, breaking the pool cover I’d made. It must have been extraordinarily loud, but I didn’t hear a thing. 

Today I finished the job of turning the fallen tree into pieces that will fit in the living room fireplace. Which is good, because just after I finished, and moved on to cutting up some other logs, the chain on my chainsaw twisted, and it’s now kinked out of shape. I’ll have to try to fix it, taking out a couple of links while I’m about it.

Anyway, I was going to continue the story of the tawse. But it’ll have to start tomorrow. It’s bedtime.