It’s stormy. Windy. Rainy. Well, windy is putting a British edge on the word; it’s 75mph gusts and 50mm of rain in twelve-ish hours or so, rain going sideways, upwards occasionally by the look of it, although technically I suppose that’s still downwards eventually, everything comes down eventually, except perhaps petrol prices — not my problem now; I’ve gone electric.
Everything underfoot has an ish sound about it. A squish, mostly, that wet sucking noise when the ground would quite like to keep your shoe, thank you, except for a branch that landed on the road behind our fence with such a resonant thump it made me look up from Spotify on my phone, and that’s with headphones on, so it was no smallish kind of impact. Somewhere outside something metallic has been clattering for the last twenty minutes and I don’t know what it is and don’t particularly want to find out because finding out would involve going outside.
“I’m back,” he calls, just returning from his afternoon walk, looking as though the wind took him apart and reassembled him with humour in mind.
“It’s cold out there,” he says, without mentioning the horizontal rain or the wind strong enough to carry off a branch without its permission.
The radio comes back to life. And the lights. I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been listening to the house until the electricity returned—the little hums and clicks of things remembering their jobs.
“…the ruins of the old West Pier are no longer playing last man standing,” says a man on Radio 2.
He gives his raincoat a shake in the kitchen.
“What about the pier?”
“Sort of fell down-ish, it seems.”
Another gust hits the house, and the lights flinch.
Written for Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness including a word with the suffix ‘ish’.. Some images created with Midjourney but some aren’t; all writing is my own work.©Misky 2006-2026.
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