Reap The Wild Wind

Part of a wall had collapsed. It had never been a complete wall, but one of those of ornateness, the bricks not bricks as such but squares to let the air pass through, or not. They are not robust enough to withstand 130 kilometres an hour's worth of wind, so someone has discovered. Perhaps they'll build a proper wall instead next time.

And everywhere there was pine. Cones; thousands of cones, small, medium, large; twig and branch of pine; whole trunk of pine. Pine lying in the street, pine lying in gardens, pine lying half in and half out gardens, pine with the procesionarios' sacs now close to the ground, close enough to touch or to grab and wonder what happens if you do so. The still strong breezes squeeze huge branches, with fresh wounds like bright fruit, jagged and swaying like dead men who've been hanged. Another gust, and you look out for the fear of the dead man's kiss crashing against your back as you make a forlorn escape.

Buffeted against kerbing or strewn indiscriminately, pine and a collective detritus of the dead spikes of palms or that plant of the pineapple family whose name I can never recall but with leaves as sharp as Johnny Depp's hands that can twirl in a high wind like a switchblade and tear the flesh.

And then another wall, by a hotel, that is also down, and the permanent marquee is flapping and torn, bending over the now wave shape formed by the artificial grass hedge. A building site has become like a bomb site, the temporary wire fencing smashed and scattered the length of the road, ever more pines crashed in on piles of bricks. By the beach, there is sand; sand mingling with all those shards of wood that has not been captured for the beach by the bamboo barriers, because those bamboo barriers have been bent from V-shape to avant-garde distortion. A cable hangs useless, disrupting communication. A shop front, abandoned for winter, has had its frames for awning and signs rearranged as abstract sculpture. Publicity boards that had occupied an empty restaurant facade have disappeared. You see them, eventually, sulking in the entrance to another shop, sharing the space with even more bits of pine and palm.

Someone walks past and says: "un desastre". And they weren't wrong. For almost twenty-four hours it had raged. A 24-hour, 130-150 kilometre-per-hour disaster.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Fleetwood Mac (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE4HGlmtOcg). Today's title - new romantic-ish and one of them co-wrote one of the biggest selling songs of all time.

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