Every conversation ended with me being told: don’t go out. Stay under cover. Keep in touch. Are you somewhere sheltered?

People in houses are kind to people in tents, and show it in online messages which make a small world wider.

“You should be OK,” said someone. “It’s going to flatten Ireland, first.”

The wind rattled the hedge above me, then stopped as if breathlessly waiting for something bigger to come along, just as I waited, having hammered in extra tent pegs, and put heavy stones along the door, which tends to gape, so the tent inflates, exhales, inflates again – a breathing blue lung.

I’ve survived storms before, so I prepared for a long night. I’ve learned that living close to nature doesn’t make me a force of it, and there is only so much I can do to fend it off. If the lung bursts, or is blown away, while it’s a disaster for me and the little crew here, there’s no malice intended. In any case, wasn’t Ophelia busy flattening Ireland?

It was getting towards late afternoon, and she certainly wasn’t bothering me here, in Pevensey – no more than a few playful slaps and tickles at the tent.

I noticed the silence, first: the lack of bird-song. Then the tent was briefly dark as a cloud of small birds met over it, and clung together to the hawthorn behind me, screaming and chattering. Outside, I could see gulls walking, silent, massed, distorted by the plastic window. They tilted silver eyes at me. Hitchcock never created more menace than my imaginings about their beaks and claws versus my blue lung.

For a few heartbeats we all waited, then Ophelia arrived – not vicious, but a warm strong wind under a sky the colour of dirty mustard, and every tiny bird and gull lifted as one into the air and went wherever birds go when their element goes crazy.

Against the flapping of the tent and the gathering roar from the west, came a Skype call:

“Seen the sky? Sahara dust and forest fires blown here by the storm.”

And after a day spent preparing to sit tight, suddenly I had to be out, under a sky blown in from Africa. I crossed the road to where I expected the sea to be angry. But the tide was out, and the sky was orange as marmalade, unreal, reflected in the ridged sand below water-colour layers of mist and black and white clouds, low over far-off receding dunes and hills.

I thought: “I’ve never seen anything like this before, in all my life, and I’ll never see it again.”

Then the wind grew stronger, more punch than slap, and I thought about my little blue tent, and safety. There was a man there on the sea-wall with me, watching the sky, and before I turned away I wanted to ask him if, like me, he felt as if he’d walked into a Chinese silk painting, and if he, too, wouldn’t have missed it for the world – but I didn’t, because we don’t ask that kind of thing of strangers, do we?

But there are storms and there are storms, and if Ophelia was as graceful here as the name suggests, Brian is a thug.

For one thing, Brian sent his little brother round late Thursday night, and in the early hours of the morning, he ripped a hole in the side of Bletchley, big enough for Hemingway to walk through. I packed everything ready for a swift evacuation, put an umbrella over OscarWildecat (who didn’t appear to care about the storm at all) and sat shivering until it was light, and I could carry out repairs.

The hole is gone, but so is one vital seam of the tent – and so are all my patching materials. And so is the illusion of safety here, because I know from my experience when somebody slashed my tent in the spring, Bletchley’s days are now numbered, would be even if, as I am writing this, Storm Brian wasn’t beating us from side to side, the blue walls which have sheltered us for months suddenly seeming fragile as a cobweb.

Brian arrived in a wall of black sky, a raging bellow, and a sudden loosing of rain which felt like cold gravel thrown at my back as I bent to replace the guy-ropes torn out by the wind last night.

There will be no trips to the sea wall today – I can hear the sea, and it’s not in the mood for visitors.

It’s hard to see how we can survive this storm, and harder to see how we can survive the winter, which will follow close on the heels of the storm season, and is predicted to be the harshest in decades. I have around two weeks to find better shelter.

I’ve learned to deal with the day, along with all the other lessons learned during this time which I never thought I’d have to live. But now and then I glimpse the immediate future.. and I wonder if I will get the chance to put those lessons to use at all.