I am living. At the end. Of the earth.

It probably seems like I’ve been obsessing a bit about the weather lately - but hey, it’s England. It’s what you do. Anyway, it’s hard not to obsess about the weather when the wind is howling non-stop outside and it’s hard to sleep at night because of the racket the sleet makes as it lashes against the windows.

A few weeks ago, when they were having the worst floods in 40 years in this part of the country, I thought that weather couldn’t get much more terrible than that. Well, I was wrong. Most emphatically wrong, in fact. As I write this, there are 90-mile-an-hour gusts of wind rattling the panes of our lovely bay window. You can’t even walk down the street without being blown back and forth across the sidewalk. The wind and rain has been going on like this since yesterday afternoon, and let me tell you, it’s getting old.

I know, I know, two days ago I was blathering on about the beauty of the wind whipping across the waves and blah blah blah…but this is a whole different kettle of fish. This weather is downright scary. There was a tornado in a town just down the road from here! What the hey? There aren’t supposed to be any tornadoes in Europe. Kansas, okay. Oklahoma, definitely. Indiana, yessiree. These are all places in which I happened to live at one point or another as a child, so I know this firsthand. But Brighton? No. No, no, no. One of the perks of living in Europe (for me, anyway) is not having to face all of the really extreme weather that America has. Or so I thought.

With so much water blowing about outside, it really feels like we’re not just by the sea, but actually at sea. Going outside is now known as “going out on deck.” You know how, in the movies, when they show boats at sea in big storms, and the people on deck are being knocked about by wind and rain and waves which are very obviously being created by people standing off-camera and tossing big bucketfuls of water at the actors? Well, it’s exactly like that here right now. When you look out the window, you may as well be looking out a porthole or something. It’s enough to make you seasick.

It must be said, though, that even though our house is a bit drafty, it’s still very solid and quite cozy when the weather is really bad like this. We can turn on lamps to drive off the darkness, sip some hot tea to drive off the cold, and play some music to drown out the incessant wailing of the wind. We seem to have quite a seaworthy little vessel here.

As long as we stay below deck, I think we’ll be fine.