As I was ladling the water over my head, I heard a shouting outside. It was Ronnie and Man, the two men that ran my cottage on Gili Trewangan. Loosely tying my sarong around my waist for modesty, I slipped out of the shower and into a dust-storm, and bumping into Ronnie, he grabbed my arm.

‘Run Howie! whirly-wind! whirly-wind!’ We rushed into the calmer dust of the yard, collecting Man on the way. Looking back, we saw the spout come through between the two cottages at walking pace, but with the force of Mike Tyson. It lifted the corner of my roof like an adult looking into a doll’s house. We were all three following it along, smiling skyward. Ronny squealed ‘My towel!’ and there it was, a hundred feet up – spinning; Bob Marley smiling down at us. ‘Come back Bob!’ shouted Man through cupped hands. The assorted yard rubbish had been sucked up with it, and wouldn’t come down for a good ten minutes.

I had a favourite goat in the yard, jet-black, with a white patch like a border collie. It had a strange bleat that was too human, and looked like one I’d had on my toy farmyard when I was a child. Tied by a washing line to a stake, he wasn’t going anywhere. We all realised at the same moment that the goat was in the whirlwind’s path and we grinned at each other wickedly; it was too late to reach it anyway. Honest.

It pulled his front feet off the ground first, then rocked him back onto them, and picked up his back ones. He was like a bucking picnic table, and at one stage was aloft on his rope – spinning round and round; a balloon with legs. Then he spun down like water going down a plughole. We were helpless with laughter now, and Ronnie, seeing that my sarong had slipped unnoticed to the floor, fell on his back kicking his legs, dreadlocks brushing the dust and shrieked, ‘White bum! …white bum!’ I joined him on the floor, trying to breathe through the laughter. If the goat had broken his moorings, I think I’d have wet myself, so it was probably best I was naked.

Ronnie’s towel never came down, at least not on Trewangan, but a toilet roll – complete and unrolled, fell down onto the goat like manna from heaven, and he set about eating it in the now unruffled air. There were no red shoes poking out from under the cottage, so I figured it hadn’t been a dream.