If you ask anyone who has been there what the Falkland Islands is like, wind is almost certain to crop up in the description in some form. There are the notorious rotor winds that affect flights to and from the Falkland Islands, there are daily coastal breezes which barely merit the description “wind” and then there are forecasts of strong winds. Coming from UK forecasting and being used to what UK forecasters mean when they mention wind, there is an entirely different scale to learn in the Falkland Islands. Windy days in much of the UK would barely merit the description “windy” on this cluster of islands in the South Atlantic. As I have discovered 4 days into our adventure, real wind whips your hood from your head. Real wind defeats all Kirby grips and plays havoc with neat hair. Real wind makes it difficult to walk anywhere through either not being able to walk into the wind or being blown off course or along too fast if the wind is coming from a different direction. Real wind whistles through even the tiniest gaps around your pvc windows, rattles the roofs and rocks your gas canister for your gas stove against its connection. Real wind causes you to worry for the security of your hen house and your washing line (and then your neighbour’s washing line and garden equipment). And it is common in the Falklands.
Our first couple of days had perhaps engendered a false sense of Falklands weather. We had landed in winter and it was admittedly cold, but the sun shone and whilst breezy it was quite pleasant. Our house is cosy and it’s only a 10 minute bracing (in the UK sense of the word) walk down the hill into town. Stanley is certainly not a pretty chocolate-box town in the Cotswolds/Surrey villages sense. Chocolate-box wouldn’t make sense here anyway as it is first and foremost a functional, working town, though there are certainly plenty of individual moments of beauty in it if you look for them and the surrounding scenery is stunning. What Stanley does have, which sets it apart from the chocolate-box prettiness, is a sense of history, endurance and determination to make an amazing life at the other end of the world. Being so remote there is a fair amount of make do and mend and repurposing of items. Getting materials in is expensive, so those little touches such as landscape gardening that might be a feature in the UK are definitely a luxury for much later here. Comfortable, functioning, welcoming homes come first. To borrow a famous phrase, it is a truth universally acknowledged that it is the people who make a place, and that is certainly the case for Stanley.
I am not sure that I have ever met so many people in the space of a few days as I have managed in my first days on the Falkland Islands. For someone who has difficulty remembering which names go with which faces, I am anticipating this may cause problems in the very near future. Between the children’s school and mums there, Richard’s colleagues, various of Richard’s friends and a whole host of introductions at MPA whilst waiting for the flight back to the UK (more about that in a later blog), I have met a huge number of invariably friendly, chatty, open people, all with tips about settling in. The main thing I have picked up is that I need to be concerned about Christmas now, especially Christmas presents which need to be ordered and on a ship well in advance of Christmas for guaranteed delivery. I also need to get a yoghurt maker to cope with erratic yoghurt supplies and ramp up my bread making to a regular weekly occurrence to cope with the cost of bread here. If the wind wasn’t sufficiently bracing on its own, the amount of introductions and the new list of things to do that has been generated from all these conversations would remedy any deficiencies in bracing-ness. Hopefully I will catch my breath shortly.
Five penguins and us 