When it comes to the weather of late, we seem to be living in a twisty meteorological thriller. One that has thrown all its budget into big, showstopping special effects. Stepping out the front door each morning you never know what peril awaits next.

Will you fall on your backside while traversing a treacherous rink of black ice? An indignity doubtless caught on the Ring doorbells of several neighbours, who then share the resulting footage to community WhatsApp and Facebook groups from a variety of embarrassing angles.

Perhaps a gust of wind will whip up the flotsam and jetsam of suburban life into a towering vortex? Inevitably seeing you smacked in the face by an airborne birdfeeder, Tesco bag for life and a soggy newspaper in quick succession.

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My favourite story of recent days comes from the Largs & Millport Weekly News about a couple in West Kilbride who, despite their home being two miles from the coast, found a starfish in their garden following Storm Isha.

Which is a bit like the plight of Ryanair passengers who took off from Dublin for Edinburgh but instead found themselves landing in Cologne after a considerable diversion due to high winds.

Among the worst fiends when it comes to wreaking havoc in storms, though, are trampolines. A herd of stampeding elephants would arguably do less damage.

A few years back, a former neighbour’s escapee trampoline toppled fences, took a chunk out of a garden shed, upended several planters and decapitated an ornamental gnome.

Its gale-fuelled rampage only ended when the trampoline hooked itself around a washing line pole, bending the metal post in half like a spoon that had fallen into the hands of Uri Geller.

Second to trampolines for causing unbridled mayhem are wheelie bins. The first whisper of wind and they lie cowped over on pavements and roads, resembling an inebriated stag party in Benidorm that hasn’t quite managed to make it back to the hotel.

The Herald: Storm Isha at PorthcawlStorm Isha at Porthcawl (Image: free)

Modern life is rubbish. When I watched Tomorrow’s World with wide-eyed wonder as a child and pictured a utopian future, I never imagined that Monday nights would involve consulting several weather apps and agonising whether it was a good idea to put the bins out.

Instead of using AI for entertainment, daft social media filters and other trite purposes, can someone please just invent a waste receptacle that checks the forecast itself, stays in a safe location during inclement weather and then pootles out to the kerb when it hears the bin lorry?

As for humans, I reckon you can learn a lot about a person from the way they behave during extreme weather events. Indeed, how you prepare for a storm, I would say, is a pretty accurate indication of how you might behave in an apocalypse.

There are, of course, the naysayers. Those who scoff and revel in faux superiority by saying things like “it’s just weather” and “this is Scotland in winter”. These, naturally, are the same people who are about as useful as a chocolate teapot when an actual crisis unfolds.

Then we have the preppers who genuinely can feel superior with their stockpile of batteries, indoor camping stove and cupboards full of neatly stacked canned goods.

Somewhere in the middle are the rest of us. Those who muddle through. I grew up in a small, semi-rural village where winter power cuts were a regular occurrence.

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We’ve come a long way from the trusty Calor gas heater and paraffin lamps my folks used to keep on standby for such emergencies. These days I have a couple of fully charged power banks and a clutch of streaming apps on my phone.

When does the apocalypse begin? When the power banks drain or I run out of pre-downloaded episodes of Only Murders In The Building. Whatever comes first.