Storm Kristin barrelled up through a very carefully selected stretch of the Silver Coast at the end of January 2026. It carried away our roof, and a good deal of what was beneath it, and left us with a building that was still ours on paper but no longer in any way habitable.
Storms were always part of the attraction. When we chose this coast, I wrote breezily about wanting a front-row seat for the untamed Atlantic weather in winter – as well as its more obvious summertime charms. We got the front row. We had not expected the show to raise the roof – literally. Nothing like the force of Storm Kristin had been recorded in Portugal before: gusts of nearly 240 km/h; higher by some local accounts. I am in no position to argue.
Before I get to our own corner of it, the scale of the tragedy needs acknowledging. Fourteen deaths have been attributed to Kristin. In the municipality of Leiria alone, something like eight million trees came down; more than half the pines in the district are gone, and whole stretches of forest with them. Factories, schools and railway lines were wrecked across one of Portugal's industrial heartlands, and the area suffered widespread power cuts with some villages still without services months after the storm. The government fast-tracked €2.5 billion in aid and asked Brussels for more. Damages were put at over €5 billion. Set against all that, one house hardly registers. But it was ours.
Grief is usually about mourning what you once had. This was not quite that. We were only half moved in when it happened. For a year we had been spending the odd week or two there while we tried to sell our house in England, and half of everything we owned had already made the crossing. So this was not the loss of a home, exactly, but of something else: a life in transit, clobbered mid-arrival.
Thankfully we were not there the night of the storm, because workmen were due at seven the next morning. We had sat on our newly installed German sofa until about eight the evening before however, watching the dark ocean and celebrating finally being granted residency. We flirted with the idea of staying the night, decided against it, and drove to our small B&B in the next village.
We heard the storm, of course. It announced itself around 3.30am. Windows shook. Gates rattled. Things came crashing down around the village in the darkness. Sunrise showed us the extent of it. No power, obviously, nor much of anything else.
We walked most of the four kilometres to the house, picking our way over fallen trees, quietly confident – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that all would be well. As we reached our gate I recognised one of my coats wedged beneath it. A coat that had been hanging safely in the bedroom wardrobe the night before.
We pushed open the large wooden doors. The aforementioned German sofa was sitting at the bottom of the garden, having exited the house by way of the roof. Our bed was alongside. The garden was littered with our belongings, bedlinen dangled from the trees and glass was everywhere.
Inside, the remains of a concrete chimney lay where our bed had stood. The sliding windows that ran the length of the bedroom were in a million tiny pieces across the room. We came so close to sleeping there that night. The workmen, simply by being due in so early, had in all likelihood saved our lives.
We had been bracing ourselves for a few fallen trees. Maybe some lost roof tiles. Ha! We didn't even have a roof, let alone tiles. Nor windows. Nor doors.
All of Bill's antique glasses were smashed, years of collecting reduced to fragments in the debris. Rugs ruined. Cabinets upturned. Pictures destroyed. We had our deeds and our plans and the half-imagined new life, and the storm went through all of it in a night. Perhaps you cannot mourn a house you never properly lived in. But you can stand in the wet rubble of a life you were halfway into, and grieve for it all the same.
Ours was the worst-hit house in the village, for the simple reason that it is the oldest. The newer builds, with their modern window fittings and well-behaved roofs, came through more or less untouched. We don't regret the choice. An old house on the edge of a cliff above the Atlantic was never the sensible option, and sensible was not what we moved here for.
As well as being a more traditional build in a village increasingly shaped by white planes, sharp angles and flat roofs with very little in the way of Portuguese identity, our house stands out on account of the treehouse in the back garden. Perched high and proud in an ancient pine, it is a landmark everyone knows. Twelve feet up a tree in the strongest winds Portugal has ever recorded and it emerged from the storm untouched. Kristin delivered her worst, yet roof, windows, door, all defiantly intact. The house, planted firmly on the ground, was not so clever.
Among my own possessions the losses were similarly acute. Clothes and shoes, obviously. Mostly replaceable. Art books – pages stuck together with the saltwater – less so.
The paints, inks and pastels were largely unscathed, but a large collection of Japanese paper initially seemed beyond rescue. Kozo, gampi, thin strong sheets kept for printing and collage; paper I had carried across borders precisely because it does not tear when handled wet. It tore.
Or rather, it did not tear so much as change its nature. Wet, dried badly, then wet again, the sheets cockled and stained and fused at the edges. The sizing went. Tide marks bloomed across them in the soft brown of old water. They became, in a word, estrago. Spoiled.
The thing they were for was no longer the thing they could do. But now, of course, they have become fascinating to photograph. Not simply as a record of loss, though there is some of that in it, but because the ruined sheets are far more interesting than the clean ones ever were.
A clean sheet of gampi is a promise of things to come. An invitation. An opportunity. These were now a record. The water had drawn on them, unevenly, with no regard for composition, and left a surface I could not have arrived at on purpose if I had tried for a year. Antoni Tàpies spent a lifetime trying to make a painting look like a wall that something had happened to. Here was the wall, and the something, handed over by a storm.
So I have a set of images now. Digital images, made with a camera, of paper made by water. Sketches, really. That is the honest word for what they are. They are not the work. They are notes towards the work, the way a charcoal study is a note towards a painting. I look at them on a screen, this stained washi glowing in a way actual paper never glows, and I can see exactly what they want to be. They want a plate. They want pressure. They want to go through an etching press and come out as something with weight and tooth, a collograph built up from the ruined sheets themselves, ink sitting in the cockles where the tide marks are. They want to be collaged back into objects you could hold, that carry the accident forward instead of flattening it into a file.
They cannot be any of that yet. I have no studio.
The studio is in the house, and the house is being rebuilt, and it will not be ready until the autumn. So the work sits in suspension. The press is in storage. The plates are not made. The sheets are in a box, and the images of the sheets are on a hard drive, and between the two there is a room that does not exist yet, with a window I have only ever seen on a drawing. I find I do not entirely mind this. There is a discipline in not being able to start (and truthfully, an awful lot else to do). You look harder at what you have when you cannot yet act on it. The sketches have to do all the thinking for a while, and thinking is most of the work anyway. And in the meantime I am writing.
It occurs to me that this is happening back to front. You are meant to make the work and then have it damaged by time, the way a print yellows or a wall weathers. Here the damage came first. The estrago is not what happened to the finished thing. It is the beginning of it. The storm did the first mark, the way a printmaker scores a plate before they know what the image is, and now it falls to me to answer that mark, months from now, in a room that is itself being rebuilt out of its own ruin.
I do not know yet what these will become. That is not false modesty; I genuinely do not. I know the press will change them. I know some sheets will not survive the soaking a collograph asks of them, and that this second ruin will be mine rather than the storm's, which may or may not feel like progress. I know the autumn is a long way off when you are living next door to a building site, watching other people's hands make the room your own hands are waiting for.
For now the paper waits in its box. The box waits in garage in the apartment next door. And I keep looking at photographs of damage I did not choose, trying to figure out the way forward the way you figure anything out that arrives before you are ready.
