Something in the air

Polymath author and adventurer Simon Winchester on his 'grasshopper mind' and current fascination - the wind.

- BY MICHELE HEWITSON

Simon Winchester, the celebrated adventurer, journalist and author, has a new book subtitled “the history and future of the wind”, so it seems only right to ask him what the wind is like where he is today. The British-American is talking from his home in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, population 800. He lives there on 30ha, most of it in forest, with his second wife, Japanese-American ceramicist Setsuko Sato, in a house built in 1750. There are four outbuildings, one for chickens with a weather station on top, a barn that is Sato's studio, a place for a car and a kayak, and Winchester's writing room and library, which is an old granary he saw in upstate New York. He had it dismantled and charmingly restored.

His wife won't allow him to have a fridge in his writing room “because if I do, I'll never come into the house at all”.

There are bears and coyotes and porcupines. The wind the day we speak? “It's actually awful. It was snowing when we drove back from our local supermarket and there were branches all over the place and fire engines were retreating from having put out an enormous fire which burnt someone's barn down. And they said, ‘Well, thank god the wind wasn't too bad. It wasn't as bad when the fire was starting as it is now. So the whole sort of narrative arc of the afternoon was very satisfactory and very interesting.”

Satisfactory because nobody died and neither did the dog, which was in a crate in the barn. “And somehow, he let himself out of the crate and alerted the owners, saying in dog language, ‘I’m afraid your barn is on fire.”

Interesting, because he finds everything interesting. “I'll be knocking on the roof of my coffin saying, ‘Come on, there’s something else I want to look into.”