Brendan

Today's storm was not, I imagine, named after our MP, but it was very much here this afternoon. A windy morning stayed dry until noon, so I got to Pilates and back with nothing more than a bit of a blow, but this afternoon has been so foul that I've actually not been out again for fear I'd be blown over. (Followers of this journal will know that this has indeed happened to me, in Malta last year). 

Instead, I've been pottering about on the fringes of genealogy, having been alerted to a match to someone in my ancestry appearing on someone else's family tree. I'm loath to pay £50 a year just to contact this person, but it was interesting to find out that my great-uncle David Stewart died at sea during WW1. It was only recently I discovered I had an ancestor in a naval uniform, as the other Stewart brothers seem to have been in the HLI and survived. I also realised, though I may have been told this when it didn't seem to matter so much, that both sides of my mother's family seem to have been Irish ... just wondering if an Irish passport would be a possibility on the basis of great-grandparents!

I'm blipping the best of the photos I was able to snatch through our window; I was scared to open one in case it was torn off, so it's not as sharp as it might be. I find it frustrating snapping waves - clicking at just the right moment is hard. But this clearly shows not only the cars driving along the shore road with the waves breaking over them, but also the cars parked, crazily, all along the pavement.

About an hour after this, I realised that the clouds over this view had turned a nasty yellow ochre colour and that behind the house, to the west, there was a break in the cover and a bright line of sunset sky. There's a message there, somehow ...