Today was a sad day in our house. We said goodbye to an old friend. It was the fault of the wind! Certainly the most powerful wind that I have ever experienced. We live in Cape Town after all and the wind blows here, sometimes! Last night it really blew. We are used to gale force winds but this was different. Last night, lying in my bed, pretending to sleep, I could hear the next gust coming. It started as a distant roar that just continued to increase in volume until it hit the house. The house did not rock but it might as well have. The windows were ripped open and banged closed, doors threatened to burst open and let in the fury from outside, roof tiles shattered and bashed themselves to bits on other roof tiles and the garden was whipped into a frenzy! And then it was just a normal gale force wind again.

Neighbours up the road told us that they lay in bed wondering not if but when they would see the stars as they imagined their roof being ripped off. Worse still, they had just days before cancelled their house insurance. Other neighbours worried about a dead tree in the farm next door and wondered if they would see it visiting them in their bedroom.

I slept little after two in the morning. At one stage I got up and went outside where I held onto the deck in between windy gusts. My plan was to save the outdoor umbrella but found it already downed on its side. I rose just after five o clock and looked out of the windows. I was greeted by an old friend lying upside down on my driveway. He had been neatly ripped into two parts. And so I found myself in my driveway in the dark and the rain sawing one of his parts into bits just so that my wife could get her car out of the garage. All that was left of my large stinkwood tree was a shattered stump.

The violence of the wind last night was awesome. My tree was not the only one that went down. A willow was split in half across the road and the dead tree fell the other way in the farm. Lying in my bed last night, I wondered how terrible it must feel to sit through a tropical cyclone or a hurricane. Knowing that your stuff is being ripped to shreds and possibly being posted to another state. You just have to wonder about the terror that people in Myanmar felt as a cyclone ripped their lives apart this weekend.

Later this morning I watched as a fat rock pigeon sat on the broken stump. He lost his home last night and now knew not what to do.