Rhi Axtell – Writer

I’m sitting in a wine bar. I’m sipping on a glass of white wine from Devon, dipping a piece of sourdough into was was once olive oil and vinegar, but the ratio has since shifted strongly in favour of the vinegar. I’m here with my wife to drink away the time before our dinner reservation, which will be followed up by an evening of jazz and folk at another bar deeper in the city.

Gosh, aren’t we metropolitan?

We like this wine bar for three reasons: the wine, the friendly staff, and the fact that they play music from our childhoods. Earlier they were playing Shania Twain’s That don’t impress me much and both of us joined in, swaying and bobbing with large grins on our faces*.

*And, no, we can’t believe you kiss your car goodnight, even if you do look like Brad Pitt.

It’s probably because of the wine and the music and the sourdough and the friendly staff (mostly the wine) that when I first hear it, I ignore it completely. And the second time. And the third.

There is some kind of alarm ringing, off in the distance. Possibly downstairs where the bar has more seating. Then again, a bit closer. Some small part of my mind has convinced myself that there is a special fridge of expensive wine that alerts people whenever it is open with a single, harsh note, repeated in a repetitive blast.

The wine is definitely the reason I don’t remember this sound. The wine and perhaps the length of time as well. This is the emergency alert alarm, recently installed and tested in the UK at least half a year earlier, to send warnings to people’s phones. What I’m hearing is phones receiving the alert across the bar at different times. If I was more with it (again, the wine is to blame), I might notice the look of concern on people’s faces as they check their phone. I’m might have even been worried myself. But I’m not. I have my wife, and sourdough, and Shania Twain and… you guessed it… wine.

My alert doesn’t arrive until about an hour later. I guess the UK Government doesn’t have me very high on their ‘important people to tell about impending disaster’ list. We are sitting in a pizza place now, trying to figure out if the weird taste on our shared vegan pizza is the broccoli (it is). There is a short blast of the alarm on a few tables over, followed by my wife’s phone. She is so startled, she picks up her phone and instantly cancels the alert without reading it*.

*Stopping horrible sounds is a higher priority to her than emergency alerts.

My alert (finally) arrives ten minutes after hers. I screenshot the alert before cancelling it.

It’s a red warning of wind. A storm is apparently coming and will hit the Welsh coast at about three am. Outside, the wind and rain already threatens its imminent arrival.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a red warning before. What does red mean?

It turns out, neither of us have seen a red alert before. We have seen plenty of yellow alerts, maybe an amber, for rain (Wales does rain very well) but never red. I look at the screenshot. The words danger to life particularly stick with me. Later in the evening, my sister will sum up a red alert like this:

Yeah, red warning is baaaaaad.

Very succinct, my sister.

Our plan was to travel up to Chester this weekend. We planned to pile onto a train at 9am Saturday morning, Christmas presents tucked into bags, backpacks full of snacks, and ride north for about three hours to meet my sister and her family at the other end.

When we finally stumble into bed after our night of wine and folk music and weird pizza, the wind is picking up some more.

It is 2am when I wake up to the apartment being shaken like a box of matchsticks. When the wind strikes the side of our building, it makes a low boom. The rain rattles on the skylight above our bed. It’s like listening to the world’s worst orchestra and, to my surprise, I find myself scared. I pull the cover up to my chin, reminding myself of times in my childhood when I was scared of the airing cupboard in my bedroom. The duvet will protect me. I convince myself, as I did back then, that it is an invincible shield.

By 7am, my wife and I are awoken again by another emergency alert on her phone. I don’t get another one. Perhaps the government noted that she ignored it the first time, so sent her another one early in the morning just to really hammer the point home.

The train to Chester has been cancelled. All trains to Chester have been cancelled. The wind rams itself against our building again and again, like a bull trying to open a locked door.

We don’t leave the bed. We don’t pack the presents into the bag. I send a message to my sister telling her we aren’t coming. She isn’t surprised. She tells me to stay safe. Something about those words unnerve me further, considering our conversations usually consist of memes and toilet humour. There is an serious ring to the words. A level of concern that leaves me uncomfortable.

And we are safe. Safe in bed. Safe with a cup of tea a few minutes later. Safely discussing how we plan to spend our newly-free weekend (not shopping for food, despite being low on provisions, the shops are all closed for safety reasons). The worst damage we experience is one of our plants on our terrace falls over.

(A tragedy, to be sure)

But what remains is the feeling of no return. We have experienced a red alert now. The storm has struck, and almost passed by, but there will be more storms. There will be more red alerts. There is a sinking feeling that this is something we are going to have to get used to.

I briefly scroll through the news in the morning to see how others are fairing. The comments are people complaining:

“I got the alert and I thought it was nukes! There I was gathering my family, getting them away from the windows, and it was just for wind, WIND!”
“Look after your loved ones – and by that I mean your wheelie bins. It’s gonna be a windy one tonight and they might fall over.”

For some, it isn’t such a big deal. But I can’t shake the feeling that this whole event was more then ‘just wind’.

One thing is for sure, even if I am drinking wine, I will recognise the emergency alert sound from now on.