How do you take a picture of wind? I wandered about with my camera today, watching leaves waltz down the street and cower in doorways, seeing rooftop aerials wobble and bounce precariously and shop awnings billow and swell like sails.

But it’s all about the movement - no static shot would have captured the buffetting bluster and blow, just as you couldn’t capture the raw energy and movement of the wind in a jar held aloft.

My mum’s parents lived in a house next to a wild heathland golf course on a hill on the edge of Port Erin on the Isle of Man. The barely-used links were the starting point for many windswept adventures and expeditions, to Bradda Head, Fleshwick Bay, and the Stupid Cairn (remind me to tell you about that at some point).

Being on an exposed part of the island, at the southernmost tip, the course was constantly battered by strong winds from across the Irish Sea. We’d walk through the rough on the edges of the course and clamber through the gorse bushes to stand on small hilly mounds (which could have been fairy hills, or Viking burial mounds, depending on whether you believed my nana or grandad) with kites, or coats held open with arms outstretched, catching the full force of the wind. It really felt as if the wind could snatch you up and whisk you away, and we almost hoped it would.

One night, a winter wind whipped up from the sea and whisked off a washing line full of drying clothes from my grandparents’ garden - a nightie, some knickers, two t-shirts, a jumper, some socks and my prized red yellow and blue striped ski jacket (it was 1984: forgive the fashion faux pas). In the morning, we awoke to find an empty line and socks strewn across the gorse on the nearside of the hill, like a scene from a favourite children’s book, the name of which I’m struggling to remember (The Very Windy Day? Mrs Something’s Wash Day?)

I donned wellies and my father’s duffel coat, which came down to my ankles, and my mum, brother, grandad and I spent a chilly hour searching the fairway for a flash of red yellow and blue puffed polyester, snagged in the heather or perhaps wrapped around the flag on the fourteenth green. There was no sign of it; the jacket that got away.