THIRTY years ago this weekend, I was awakened in the early hours of the morning by the sound of my seafront house juddering and groaning as if it were being punched. As I lay in my bed in the semi-darkness, I fancied that I could actually feel the bricks and mortar reeling as the blows landed.

I got up, and when I reached the front door which overlooked the promenade, a huge glass seaside shelter exploded before my eyes. The wind pulverised one of the large panels and then flattened the rest of the structure into a sprawl of twisted metal and jagged panes of smashed glass.

I was living in Hastings, on the south coast, training to be an Echo journalist, where the Great Storm of 1987 came ashore.

I remember how the wind – gusts were recorded of 120mph on the Sussex coast – buffeted me backwards. Not only did it physically push me, but it seemed to bruise me, such was its strength.

But, more than anything, I remember the distressed state of the air. It was bleary. It was filled with stuff so I couldn’t see through it properly: seaspray, rain droplets, leaves, twigs, dust, debris – flying stuff.

There were also some extraordinary stories flying about. A fisherman had been killed by a shed which had been blown down the beach as he tried to run away from it. An elderly gentleman, unable to sleep because of the roar of the storm, had sat by his fire, reading, and the chimney had come down on top of him. Fortunately, though, he’d been sitting centrally in his room, so as the chimney fell, the main beam over his head had acted like a cheesewire, and he was found without a scratch with two piles of bricks on either side of his chair, still reading.

Most people remember the Great Storm for weatherman Michael Fish’s failure to predict it, and some newspapers this week have been excitedly dredging up those memories because Hurricane Ophelia is due to strike on the 30th anniversary.

But why was my storm not a hurricane? “Hurricane” is from a Carib word, “huracan”, meaning a large, swirling storm, and it only blew into the English language in the mid 16th Century as European explorers became acquainted with Caribbean weather systems.

Therefore, to be a hurricane, like Ophelia, a storm must originate in the tropics, whereas the Great Storm generated in the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of Spain. However, as it blew in in excess of 74mph, it can be said to have had “hurricane-force winds”.

MANY thanks to everyone who has been in touch about my first bout of gout. Fellow sufferers have enjoyed regaling me in the last week with stories about their excruciating pain, and it is clear that I got off lightly. My symptoms vanished almost immediately I stopped binge-drinking my beautiful, crystal clear apple juice that I had squeezed in vast quantities from our autumnal windfalls.

My GP rather pooh-poohed my suggestion that my condition might have been brought on by my excessive consumption of my fruit juice, although fructose – fruit sugar – can be a contributory factor.

However, on Monday night, I was speaking at the Sedgefield Book Fair and a lady in my audience said she too had suffered gout for the first time in her life this autumn and it, too, had disappeared when she had finished her homemade apple juice.