EARLY WARNING
My first warning came from Timo who had spotted this blip on the weather map a week early. The red phone in my office had been dormant most of the winter, submerged under piles of overdue bills, hard drives and letters from the editor asking me to stop writing about my red phone, but one morning I luckily spotted that good old familiar glow flashing on and off through the debris. I scrambled to pick up the receiver wiping the layers of dust as I listened to the encrypted message (well it wasn’t encrypted but I can’t speak Northern Ireland’ese so I had to decode it) – ‘JC, this is just a warning, but next Saturday in Cornwall is looking epic, I know you had promised to take the Mrs to that fancy new restaurant at Portsmouth’s Tesco but this could be one of those days you don’t want to miss!’ A week is a long time for a forecast to change but gradually as the next days unfolded, the stars started to line up and frantic plans were made to swap round my dinner date and prepare for being locked out of the house for the next year and a bit.