Gnome-ageddon: Storm couple Ciara and Dennis may force garden rethink – Susan Morrison

Ciara and Dennis sounded like a pleasant couple you invite around for dinner, only to discover that they are both fond of a bevvy or ten, which turns them into raging hoolies around midnight, smashing your crockery for fun.

The trouble is these two have more relatives ready to crawl out of the woodwork than a brand-new lottery winner and they’re all planning to visit us in the future.

This will obviously lead to a change in our gardening habits. Post-Dennis, one of our little trees was engulfed in a sheet of translucent white plastic. God knows where it came from. It took ages to unwrap it.

Didn’t half give me a turn when I came down in the morning. It looked like a haunted bride had taken up residence at the bottom of the garden.

Pampas grass may vanish from Scotland’s gardens. No great loss there, although someone once told me that people who had pampas grass in their front gardens were secretly advertising the fact that they were swingers. I suspect it may not be true.

We may also have to invest in sturdier garden gnomes. Weather-related gnome distress is real. Few things are sadder than a fishing gnome blown about by tempestuous Ciara. His wee rod was clean snapped in two.

We must reconsider our dedication to the trampoline or learn to lash them down.

To our American cousins, hurricanes and tornados are central to great films like The Wizard of Oz, Key Largo and The Perfect Storm, which I don’t watch because George Clooney dies at the end.

We’ve added to that roll call of mighty screen storms with endless YouTube footage of trampolines blowing across the neighbour’s garage whilst a Scottish voice crows, “Haw hey, it’s away, Margaret!”

Not exactly over the rainbow, but it usually winds up blocking someone’s monobrick road.