Odd this day
Three bricks. Rainwater. Broken glass. Christmas clementines. These are vomited across our limestone floor.
Yes! Praise be! It’s the 16th anniversary of MY TORNADO HELL.
Thank you, thank you, anonymous person who turned that long-deleted piece into a permanent memorial.
The glass roof of the side-return exploded, tinkling down from the ceiling like sharp raindrops
(“Sharp raindrops”, incidentally, reminds me of Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris’ Observer pisstake of Martin Amis, in which his post-9/11 description of “the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty” became aircraft “sleeking in like harsh metal ducklings”.)
But there’s more.
Suddenly I glanced out of the window. ‘Oh my God,’ I said, standing up. ‘Oh my God,’ I said into the phone. Obviously there’d been a terrorist bomb.
Much more. A dog called Douschka “shaking and walking aimlessly in circles of crunching glass”, a couple “told to throw away all their possessions”, and “A Toyota halved by a concrete lintel” also appear.
Is this a bit mean of me? Yes. But a follow-up piece six months later — Tornado Alley: the final fallout — describes the mocking response of some on social media to the original article as “internet terrorism”, which assuages my guilt a little.
(Also, a further sequel in 2008 basically retreads the whole thing, but throws in a mention of a neighbour “who sold her event venues business for £21 million” and the thrill of discovering how “bohemian” the neighbourhood is, containing as it does “two lesbians”.)
It is easy to take the piss, though, and — in the interests of fairness — the photo that accompanies the original article does make it clear that these houses have been Royally Fucked Up, to use the correct insurance company terminology.
I do think they may not have entirely helped themselves with the first choice of ‘before’ shot there, mind you. Not least because, when you look at it carefully, it seems to suggest that theirs is the house (towards the centre of the first ‘after’ shot) which suffered the least visible damage (unlike their next-door neighbours to the left, who seem to have most of the top floor destroyed).
Anyway, if, like me, you are a cold, awful person with a void where a soul should be, I can recommend nipping back to the top and clicking through to the full piece. It is… intense.
More recently in this genre, you may also enjoy the Covid-era tale of the people who “gave up one spare room to bring our nanny into our South Kensington home” and found home-schooling went much better if you hired tutors for £65–95 an hour.
People with a lot more money than us do seem to become slightly detached from what rest of us consider reality, do they not? I wonder where the cut-off point is.
