I Live in a Windmill
By: Ruth Livingstone
Tags: Covid Diaries, Weather, Windmill

I Live in a Windmill

When COVID hit, I was living in a city in the north of England. It was a great city, with lively bars and clubs and restaurants, along with wonderful music venues, museums and galleries. But, during lockdown, everything closed. And a city with everything closed becomes a concrete prison.

During that prolonged COVID lockdown, my yearning for open spaces was almost unbearable, and I started looking for alternatives.

After an internet search, I found this windmill for sale in rural Wales, took a virtual video tour, and knew I wanted it. Travel was banned, and the purchase had to wait until the lockdown was lifted enough for estate agents to reopen. One quick (and slightly illegal visit) confirmed my decision. Then the interminable buying process began and, many months later, during which my city in the north of England went back in a second lockdown, I finally completed the legal proceedings - and the mill became mine.

I moved in on a prophetic date. The 11th of September. 9/11

This place is my escape, my refuge, and my special place. I feel lucky to have found it. But some things are difficult when your residence is a windmill.

You are certainly closer to the weather.

For example, now, while sitting here and typing this, I can hear the wind thrashing at my windows and the rain slicing sideways across the glass. Water tumbles down the panes and looks for entry. It seeps through any nick and gap it can find, sending liquid fingers under the glass and forming pools on my windowsills, before sliding off and downwards onto carpets, furniture, and electrical fittings.

The water flowing across the sills took me by surprise at first. Now, I have learnt to keep a supply of towels handy and lay them out along the wood as a precaution when the rainstorm first hits.

Windmills are, of course, deliberately placed in windy situations. My mill stopped working in the 1930s, when it’s sails blew off in a storm. But the wind doesn’t care that it is no longer needed. It hurls itself around the mill, howling and growling, like an enraged monster frantically searching for those missing sails.

My first night here, I couldn’t sleep. Such a noise!

But, I should be used to noise. I’d moved from a house where there were two pubs at the end of the road, and a social club a couple of doors away. I was regularly kept awake well past midnight by the sound of car doors slamming and long, loud, goodbye conversations held by late-night drinkers right outside my window. The traffic noise continued all night, and revved up around 6am. There was also the occasional excitement of a police helicopter hovering overhead, and the constant symphony of car and house alarms.

The mill, in comparison to my former house, is an oasis of peace. It’s just that here the wind seemed to have a personal interest in me and my home. A malicious interest.

Last night, the gusts of wind reached 60 or 70 miles an hour. (This is a guess, of course.) The sound of water crashing against the windows, and the sight of waves of moisture flooding down the glass, gave me the illusion I was in a ship, out at sea. A sinking ship. Maybe all those bath towels across the sills would not be enough to stem the flow, and I would have to start bailing out?

Luckily the storm abated at around midnight. I could stop obsessively checking the saturation status of the towels, and finally go to bed and to sleep.

When I woke this morning, it was to blissful calm. Yes, the wind was still blowing around the mill (it never stops), but there was no moisture in it. Even better, the sun was shining. Light and joy flooded the place.

I put the damp towels in the dryer, and remembered how wonderful it is to live in a windmill on the top of a hill.

Tonight the wind and rain are back. The towels are in place, just in case, and I must get up and check them in a moment. But the storm is less vicious than yesterday and, as the dusk turns to darkness outside, the wind seems to be subsiding. Settling down. Running out of puff.

I must remember the wind doesn’t care that I live here in the mill now, and its frantic battering is not a personal attack. It is only behaving like wind should behave. The wind has no feelings, no conscience, and no reason to be friendly. (A bit like COVID, really.) It simply exists. It is just out there. Where else could it go?

The wind is not exactly my friend, but it is not my enemy either. It is up to me to find a way to cope with it, to accept it exists, and to adapt my life to its loud demands.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go check on those towels…