Exmoor Lockdown Diary 90 - Thunder and Lightning

Sitting here in my loft office on this 90th day of the lockdown - or my lockdown, at least - I am almost deafened by the sound of thunder. The electricity supply has been knocked out twice and I shouldn’t really be risking working on my expensive iMac computer. An electrical surge could blow the bloody thing up at any minute.

So, thinking quickly about my self-promise to keep the Exmoor Lockdown Diary going and going until I either wither of old age or run out of cider and so have to get out of the valley - I looked up “thunder and lightning” in my files and found an old newspaper column on the subject. I wrote it during another fierce summer storm a few years ago.

And It mentions dear old Monty - our lovely old lurcher who became quite famous for penning a newspaper column of his own. He used to get far more in the way of fan mail than me - and I really do mean that. In one of the early Monty columns I explained I’d bought a special helmet in Silicon Valley while holidaying in California. Some friends there worked for the company which had developed it - and as it was a very early experimental model they wanted to know if it would work in the UK.

The helmet translated canine thoughts into English and they weren’t sure if it could handle UK English, if you see what I mean. And a lot of people did see. We were inundated with letters from readers who wanted to know where they could buy such a helmet.

So well did the mysterious object work, there was no stopping Monty in his newspaper career. There was even talk of a publisher doing a book of the collected Monty columns - gawd knows what happened to that. Turned to dust, like most money-making ideas around here…

Anyway, here is the column I wrote after escaping from a scary thunder and lighting storm with Monty about 10 years ago…

Yikes… It’s a word I may have employed an hour ago as I scarpered across a hilltop as fast as my legs would carry me. Monty the lurcher was barking much the same in dog language as he legged it with a good deal more athleticism than me.  

There is something terrifying about being caught out by lightning – especially when you are walking in high hills. I’ve never been in an earthquake but - in the same way you don’t expect the earth to shake - it seems unreasonable that the gentle sky should try and zap you with a deadly ray-gun. 

That’s what it was doing earlier and it came as a rather frightening surprise. It was the real deal – fork lightning that punched the ground just yards from where I was standing. Or running, to be more exact. For a few moments up there on the hill, I felt like some poor blighter going “over the top” in 1914 France.

The interlude has left me a little shaken. Of course I wasn’t expecting to be fired at by the gods when I took Monty up the hill. I should have suspected something listening to the World At One on Radio Four earlier. Not that they warned of freak weather because – as this column often complains – the Met Office does its best to ignore the West Country. But there were telltale spats of atmospheric noise crackling on my long-wave radio - the little crunches that mean lightning is not too distant.

What a sorry sight Monty and I must have been - cowering in the forest, which we managed to reach unscathed. There, under a densely needled pine, we sheltered from the cloudburst – and all around us the lightning was turning the black woods into bright summer’s day. 

Was it the right place to be? I recall being told as a boy not to go under trees for shelter in a thunderstorm – but surely it was better than staying out there in the high fields where my six-foot frame was by far the nearest thing to the heaven in the whole of West Somerset? Moreover, there were an awful lot of trees in the forest – it would have been unlucky if the lightning had chosen ours to cleave asunder. 

Nevertheless, Monty and I had our doubts as we crouched there for the best part of an hour. Luckily, I was in good company. I have taken, of late, to loading old episodes of radio’s Just A Minute on my iPod, because I think they are among the funniest things ever recorded.

“No Nick, I never faltered… I never did. Oh Nick!” wails the extraordinary and irrepressible Kenneth Williams. Laughter. Buzz. Clement Freud, as dry as dry can be: “Repetition of ha… ha… ha… ha…” 

Williams, with as much indignation as any one man could ever muster: “Nick, you bloomin’ great nanna… I haven’t come ‘ere all the way from Great Portland Street to be treated like this!”

American actress Elaine Stritch: “Kenneth, I get the way you play this game now – you turn every single word into a three-act play…”

And there I was, in a one-man-and-his-dog-act play, besieged by lightning and weeping with laughter between the cannonades of thunder. Upon reflection, it seems now to have been the laughter of a madman – which, if global warming is accelerating, may well be the last sound anyone on this planet ever hears as it spins to its overheated doom.

This amazing shot of Monty was taken by my good friend, photographer Richard Austin