"whisky-dave" wrote in message
...
On Tuesday, 4 May 2021 at 13:21:59 UTC+1, Paul wrote:
R D S wrote:
There's a recognised phobia of wind, I don't think i'm at that level,
i'm not curled up in the foetal position but I am in my office in the
loft at work and the gusts are making me tense up.

Didn't sleep very well last night with gusts hammering the house.
I've lived there 20+ years and it's a windy spot but in all that time
the only issues we've had are a couple of lost slates (and several
flattened green cheap greenhouses).
It doesn't help that I was out at 5.30am recently collecting the
contents of our recycling bin from the street in a gale/****ing down
rain.

I get particularly stressed with open windows and have to have them all
shut, especially so if we are away from home. I dare myself to leave
them open to (hopefully) demonstrate that they aren't going going to be
torn off but I panic and buckle.

Just wondering how common this is, is anyone else bothered in this way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancraophobia

The only time I've felt decidedly uneasy was the day of the 2nd Great Gale
in the late 80s (the one during the day). I was on the 10th (top) floor of
our office and the metal windows were rattling and banging in their frames.
A coat stand started swaying in the wind that the window didn't completely
keep out. Then a window pane shattered, scattering shards of glass
everywhere. People started to congregate in the labs which were in the spine
of the building, furthest from the windows in the desk areas to either side.

Suddenly there was an almighty crash from outside. There was a
single-brick-thickness of wall about 10 feet high and maybe 50 feet long
which divided the path into the building from the loading bay. A colleague
used a wheelchair, and the disabled parking was a marked bay alongside that
wall. He'd got back from going into town at lunchtime, and found that
someone else (not disabled) had parked in the bay, so Steve had to park in
the main car park. His car had a lucky escape, because the unauthorised car
got badly dented by the falling bricks. When that wall was rebuilt, I notice
they made it two bricks thick, with plenty of cross-bricks every so often
for added rigidity.


I slept through most of the 1st Great Gale, and woke when apparently it was
almost over. Amid the general buffeting of the wind, there was an occasional
loud crack. When I went to look at the damage round about before going to
work, I saw that a lot of the pine trees in the forest which began about 1/4
mile from my house had snapped off at about 10 feet but the trees were
packed so densely that they didn't fall over but remained standing alongside
their roots - a very eerie sight.