*House where Bob Wills grew up, ‘down between the rivers,’ north of Turkey, Texas.*

Autumn in Orkney doesn’t blaze in golds and browns. You need swathes of leafy trees for that kind of glory. More often we’re grey and dreich. That’s certainly the case this weekend. The mist is thick and the rain is slow but endless. Taking a brief walk, it’s impossible to know where mist ends and rain begins. The world is a big grey dog running out of the sea. It shakes its coat and soaks the rest of us, over and over, all day long.

Such vexing dampness is better than the violence of the winds last weekend. Storm Amy was remarkable, not for the worst of her gusts – 66mph here, 136mph down in the Cairngorms – but for the sustained power of the wind from the afternoon of Friday 3rd all the way through to lunchtime on Sunday 5th. With an Amber Warning in place for Saturday, and buses cancelled, we took the decision not to open the shop that day. Once or twice we’ve been late in opening, or had to close early, because of big snowfalls, but as far as I can remember we’ve never had to close because of wind. It didn’t seem safe to ask staff to travel in, when debris could be flying around them at 66mph. Several other shops along the street took the same decision, while others closed early.

We’re all safely out the far side of Storm Amy, and the only structural damage seems to be the odd fallen slate. It did remind me of great winds of the past, and greater destruction. A dozen years ago, two days before Christmas, we were hunkering down at home in the face of tremendous gales from the west. And then came a sound I’ll never forget…a ripping, riving racket overhead. The wind had caught the edge of our roof, and was peeling off the slates row by row. A terrifying sound! Was the whole roof going to rip off? It was too dangerous to go outside, and too dark to see anything anyway. We had to wait till the calm of Christmas Eve morning to inspect the damage. About a quarter of the roof had been stripped down to the sarking boards. Shards of shattered slate were scattered across the garden.

That wasn’t the worst wind I remember. Far more extreme was the tornado I ran into in Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle. It was the late ‘90s. I was over in Texas researching a TV programme about western swing. I’d visited Budy Holly’s grave in Lubbock, Roy Orbison’s hometown of Wink, and Bob Wills’ old stamping ground of Turkey, Texas. Now I was waiting for a TV director to fly in, and killing a few hours by driving around looking at Amarillo’s run-down honky-tonks, neon signs, cowboy-boot stores and remnants of Route 66.

It was 6pm and I was thinking it might be time to find a diner and eat some chicken-fried steak or huevos rancheros, when suddenly – it felt like instantly – the sky turned black as great clouds rolled in from the prairie. Ten seconds later rain started falling. And not just falling, but pelting, pouring, bucketing. The wide streets of the city, broad and flat enough that a jetliner could land on them, were all at once transformed into waterways. At intersections where the roadway dipped, streams of water rushed and splashed as cars drove through them. Water boiled at the edges of the sidewalks, as drains were overwhelmed and backed up onto the road. That’s when the lightning started, and the sirens.

I’d been in Texas long enough to know what was happening. Amarillo was, after all, smack dab in the middle of Tornado Alley, that great swathe of the central US that’s the perfect breeding ground for these monstrous whirlwinds. I forgot all about eating and headed straight back to my hotel, fording multiple flooded intersections, feeling the car buffeted by rising winds, the wailing sirens howling in my ears all the way.

Safely ensconced in my room, I pulled back the curtains and looked north. Lightning flickered all along the horizon over the suburbs of the city. Roiling black clouds filled the sky, with a blurred but unmistakeable funnel shape moving slowly from west to east. I was safe in a sturdy modern building, a couple of miles away from the tornado. Still, it was a terrifying sight. Earlier in my trip, I’d read about a man killed in a tornado near Dallas, when flood water sucked him down one of those giant, overwhelmed roadside drains.

I closed the curtains and looked at the room service menu; I didn’t even want to venture down to the restaurant on the ground floor. A chicken salad ordered, I lay back to watch weather reports on the local news. The tornado had touched down first on farmland, then moved slowly into residential areas. There were reports of mobile homes destroyed and buildings damaged.

A knock on the door, and a smiling waitress with a tray covered in food: half a chicken, two corn on the cobs, a basket of bread rolls, wobbly pink jello, a mound of potato salad, a mountain of lettuce, onion rings, black-eyed peas, deep-fried cheese-stuffed jalapenos…

‘There must be some mistake,’ I said. ‘I ordered chicken salad for one.’

‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas.’

‘Even the wind,’ I said.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 16th October 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 12th October