The storms are no different - but we are Things have been made worse in the commuter counties around London by the passive-aggressive policy of those in charge of trains. Passengers get annoyed if they're stuck for hours on trains, goes the thinking, so we'll cancel the lot till we've tidied away all the wrong kind of trees from the line and we're sure of a clear run. Cancellations now follow every new rainstorm that arrives from the west promptly to schedule. And Tewkesbury Abbey always features on television, as we noted in a leading article yesterday, because it looks striking on its island of rising ground, surrounded by floodwaters from the confluence of the rivers Avon and Severn, as it is every year. Tewkesbury is also in the greeting-line for the westerly gales. It was in a big storm, in February 1661, that "at Tewkesbury a man was blown from an house and broken to pieces." Those words were written by Daniel Defoe, the author of the classic account of the storm of November 26-27 1703, which still claims the right above all others to the title of the Great Storm. That night, the sea rushed up the Severn estuary, carrying a whole house and stable inland at Berkeley. When the stable fell apart, out jumped the horse, none the worse. The Bishop of Bath and Wells was not so fortunate. A chimney stack fell on to the bed where he and his wife were lying and drove it through the floor, burying their dead bodies in rubble. The Great Storm killed 10,000 or 15,000 people. No one quite knows. In the current storms, deaths are rare, thank heavens. The bad-news narrative that blames the weather for everything has to recruit to its casualties even a worker in America crushed by a 100ft pile of salt stockpiled for the icy roads. Yet the Great Storm of 1703 keeps its title not just by force of fatal numbers, but because Defoe made it appeal to the imagination. He piled up details from contemporary reports until the reader could almost hear the roaring of the wind that lifted the roof from Westminster Abbey. For Defoe, it was a rehearsal for his great disaster novel: A Journal of the Plague Year. This latter fiction purports to be a collection of facts. It was a way of telling a story that HG Wells developed in The War of the Worlds. Defoe's narrator, called only HF, in the intervals between casting up the numbers of victims, wonders what caused the plague. He see-saws between natural philosophy (as he called what we know as "science") and Providence. Was the plague, like the Great Storm to come, a punishment? Today, we rather resent the right of God to punish us, even if He exists. Yet our own instincts have taken a step towards the primitive. We see bovine spongiform encephalopathy, salmonella in eggs, horse meat in burgers and savage winter storms all as symptoms of having broken some taboo of going "against nature." In a play by Aeschylus, Xerxes is defeated in battle because he hubristically bridged the Hellespont with boats. It was against nature. The present-day explanation of the storms is that we have offended nature by burning too much organic matter.