Well blow me down – it’s a hurricane

Even the most fortunate get clobbered eventually, as this country is discovering this year as regards weather. That applies whether you believe in God or you’re of the opinion that everything is controlled by something else — as a friend noted recently “the Universe has me right where I should be”, as if the universe had the capacity to think. Tropical storms are extending their reach, and places which normally peep out from behind descriptions that declare them to be “outside the hurricane belt” have had their feathers ruffled. After all, if countries on the other side of the Atlantic can be hit by extreme weather that started 4,000 miles away, it is only to be expected in Trinidad and Tobago.

Having moved here from the Turks & Caicos Islands, which are well and truly within the hurricane belt — right below the hurricane navel, in fact — I can tell you it was a relief not to have to look every morning at the websites that chart the progress of whichever delinquent patch of wind and rain was lurching around the Caribbean, looking for trouble.

When you’re in a designated danger zone you find yourself getting ready for something you’re desperately hoping will never happen.

Thus, we had bought a little gas stove, a huge torch and spare batteries, and rather than spending a fortune on bottled drinking water I would fill each newly-emptied one with tap water. You’re advised to stock up on tinned food, so you end up with cupboards full of corned beef, baked beans and fruit cocktail that will keep you going for weeks if you finally decide to move away from the trouble spot.

I also found myself checking out the windows, because you’re supposed to have some sort of protection for them. When it’s a rented house, though, you have neither the right to bang nails into planks and improvise, nor the inclination to pay a builder to do something more professional.

Calling them something less dramatic than hurricanes might keep the specialists happy, but having experienced the “remnants” of a “tropical storm” in the Channel Islands in 1987, I can tell you that terminology isn’t much of a comfort when you can see the 4ft x 4ft panes of glass in your windows actually bending with the invisible but all too audible force outside.

That one struck overnight, which was probably a blessing — or a random decision by whoever this Universe character is — and my next door neighbour went off to work at eight the next morning with a chainsaw in his car to make his way like a modern-day Tarzan through the fallen trees that blocked the lanes of our quiet, leafy area.

That “weather event” didn’t have a name, because apparently such storms don’t. I’m not exactly sure how this works, because the one menacing this part of the world this week was called Don. Not Donald, mind you, but Don. When did we get so familiar with weather systems that we started addressing them as if they were friends? They don’t make up these names on the spur of the moment, though; there are lists of them, and they are reused every six years unless one actually gets famous, in which case it is immortalised and no young pretender may confuse the issue.

The names that appear in our local history books include Flora (1963) and Bret (1993).

The lists are from A to Z, a mix of male and female, and perhaps because it is unlikely we will get through 26 in one season, there are only two beginning with Z: Zeke and Zelda, and they appear at the bottom of every year’s list. There aren’t that many names beginning with z anyway.

A friend in Grand Turk lost his house in 2008’s Hurricane Ike, which also did for parts of Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, and has now been retired. He literally lost some of it: being a wooden frame faced with corrugated iron sheets, much of it just took off and blew away. He now lives in a new house, right on the beach, and I asked him how much the insurance was. It’s not insured, he told me.

That was so expensive that he had decided to spend the money on extra steel within the construction, so that if disaster did strike him again, at least his bedroom wasn’t going to take off this time.

Hurricanes (or cyclones or whatever else you want to call them) are mysterious phenomena that seem like the devil’s response to the Caribbean idyll.

Yes, you can bask in the sun 365 days a year, it seems to imply, but you’re not having everything your own way.