And who will forget this time last year when the waves all but engulfed the Helensburgh seafront and any properties with the ill fortune to be under their flight path?

Storms are just plain frightening, and the fact that they’re now forecast accurately and in advance does little to calm the nerves.

Our worst recent one on the Peninsula turned spring overnight into autumn as we woke up to the newly budding bright green trees scorched brown in the gale force winds.

And every time those terrifying gusts return I recall that year and the morning the dog and I sat by candlelight, huddled in the back of a freezing house with a battery radio, hearing heaven knew what crashing round about us.

Daylight brought sight of a wrecked greenhouse, decapitated chimney, and deck posts smashed like matchwood. Sundry possessions were strewn around neighbouring roads and gardens.

But we also saw a neighbouring house whose over-hanging eaves had been used by the wind as a tin opener to peel back half the roof. By comparison our losses seemed suddenly slight. A neighbour’s woodland garden had found once mighty trees, planted a generation ago, felled like twigs.

Storms engender a sense of complete helplessness especially when power is also cut off, and you have a stark reminder how the many functions and gadgets on which most of our lives are now dependant can be rendered utterly and instantly useless.

In the midst of this latest batch of gales the school bus laid on to take children from the Peninsula round to Hermitage Academy sported just six passengers.

Parents quite rightly assumed that a double decker was hardly the best form of transport on days when high sided vehicles had been routinely prevented from travelling across many routes and bridges in the rest of the country.

Inevitably a spokesperson was found to intone that ‘pupils’ safety was always ‘paramount’. A difficult sentiment to stand up when, as we’ve just witnessed, areas where the winds blow fiercely from loch and firth pose regular and annual hazards to all travellers.

Plan for new prison misses the point ON Wednesday a conference in Edinburgh heard from a very high-powered line-up of speakers on the question of female imprisonment. It’s a matter of some urgency, since the incoming Scottish justice minister has inherited a plan to build a new prison for women across the water in Inverclyde.

This despite a fistful of reports on female offending and the troubled history of Cornton Vale, all of which reach the common sense conclusion that what is most needed is not more prison cells, but more community based support.

The record of self harm and suicide in Cornton Vale, Scotland’s solitary female only establishment outside Stirling, is a depressing one, despite the many efforts of successive governors to improve conditions. The fact is that a high proportion of its inmates have serious mental health issues, and a very small number have a record of violence which requires they be locked up for the sake of community safety.

A new report compiled by the Soroptimists in conjunction with the Prison Reform Trust makes the point that police and courts too often define gender equality as sending equal proportions of male and female offenders to prison.

Yet not only are the criminal histories significantly different, but sending a woman to prison often has a catastrophic effect on children, and grandparents. In effect whole families serve the sentence. (As they do, of course, with many male prisoners too.) But because there are no local alternatives, women are routinely incarcerated so far from their families that visiting is difficult and relationships founder.

There are some nice glossy images available of the proposed new nick, all pastel colours and careful landscaping. It rather misses the point that what’s most needed to solve female offending is not prettier cells, but supportive community-based options which stop family break up and reduce the prospect of future offences.

Petty offenders tend to be put in jail for short sentences – for both women and men an extraordinarily expensive way to minimise the prospect of rehabilitation since there’s little time to do much else than lock them away.

It's you park - let's treat it as such IT really is an ‘on the one hand, on the other’ shout isn’t it. Both sides of the argument on extending the ban on wild camping in the Lomond and Trossachs National Park make reasonable points.

Folks like former chief inspector Kevin Findlater and outdoor guru Cameron McNeish think the by-law draconian and liable to criminalise the very folks the Park was set up to serve.

Proponents of extending the laws from the east shore argue that it is the only way to stop the despoliation of the shores by the booze and barbecue brigade who leave a trail of debris, destruction not to mention human excrement behind them.

That our national park is so near so many highly populated areas is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that thousands of urban dwellers can access a beautiful lung within an hour or two. And a curse in that the most accessible areas can be put under too much pressure.

The one wholly positive aspect is that the matter has gone out to consultation in the Your Park exercise, and that the decision will not be made without input from those who care most deeply about the area.