Peter Rhodes on a brilliant writer, a great day for wind turbines and why we need something scarier than red warnings

As the old saying goes, it's an ill wind that blows no-one any good. The raging power of Storm Eunice may have brought death and destruction but it also did amazing things for energy prices as wind turbines went mad. By the end of the blow, according to one measure, the price of UK power fell by 11 per cent.

Now the big question. When will that massive drop in power prices find its way into your electricity bills? I fear the answer is never.

And while the loss of life and property is a terrible thing, if that was the worst storm for 30 years, it just proves what a very unstormy country we live in. A red warning is the Met Office's most severe weather warning and the Office issued two of them. Yet the impact was less than expected which could make some people think they can survive anything. Do we need something scarier than red, a black warning, for example?

P J O'Rourke, the American author and satirist who has died aged 74, was one of those writers you remember not only for his books but for some brilliant little observations on the human condition. His endless tips for life range from the short, snappy: “Never wear anything that panics the cat” to the altogether more serious: “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”

I can never travel anywhere south of Dover without thinking of O'Rourke's advice on driving in the Third World: “Which side of the road do they drive on? This is easy. They drive on your side.”

As with all great writers, you may find yourself attributing things to him that he didn't actually write. Although I was sure the advice “Never eat anything bigger than your head,” appeared in a list of O'Rourke's tips, turns out it was actually written by the American cartoonist B. Kliban and is also attributed to Miss Piggy.

News report: “More than £10,000 worth of laughing gas was stolen from a lorry parked at a service station on the M6 this morning.” It's a curious thing but the more you read it, the more you laugh.