Two years ago today, I was lying under my desk, covered in glass, convinced I was about to die as a monstrous black cloud roared across my garden at 100mph, blasting branches and bricks into the air like a massive explosion. I’d barely had time to think Wizard of Oz before the tornado ripped through 150 homes in Kensal Rise, Northwest London, rendering 50 of them uninhabitable in just 2 seconds.

As I lay there, the windows exploded and glass showered down like rain as the roof lifted. Neighbours’ homes lost entire walls. But, miraculously, nobody was killed or even seriously injured. And, remarkably, what happened in those few terrifying moments has since turned out to have been an unexpected force for good.

Our street, where we’ve now lived for four yars since leaving smarter Holland Park in search of more space and a bigger garden, has always been a community.

At Halloween we hold a competition for the best-decorated house; the children play in one another’s homes, and some of us share school runs. But the ‘twister’ took things to a different level. I was struck by how people who might never have spoken before offered one another tea, clothing and beds. I also felt incredibly grateful to be alive – gaining particular strength from knowing that, had I stood for just two seconds more at my window, I would have been speared with flying glass and would probably now be blind or dead.

My intellectual grasp of the fragility of human existence was replaced with a deeper, visceral understanding of its transience. My attitude to life changed over the next few days: I realised that things were beyond my control and that there was no point worrying. If your time’s up, it’s up.

In such a context, losing some of our possessions seemed irrelevant; and anyway, our insurers were helpful. Our old Vi-Spring bed, used as a trampoline by the children, was replaced with a fabulous new one, and lacerated furniture was updated with new alternatives. Even our house is now improved – as we were in the throes of repair work, we decided to add a loft room. And I’d recommend a tornado to anyone who feels it’s time they rethought their colour scheme.

By September 2007 most of the residents had moved back in and we held a street party to celebrate. There were decorations hung across the road, trestle tables down the middle, and a dish from every home reflecting residents’ nationalities – from 1,000-year-old Chinese eggs to Jamaican chicken. Children played football alongside the street’s sax and keyboard players, who normally perform at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. And the firemen who had come to our rescue on the day were invited back.

I met psychotherapists, writers and actors, a costume designer and a food stylist; nuclear families, single parents and two lesbians with their daughter. I’d always suspected that our street was interesting, a place of bohemian inclinations, books and pianos, yet I had still yearned for the stucco splendour of Holland Park. Ironically, it took being blasted out of my property to make me feel at home.

This year, our neighbour Sally Wilton (who in 2006 sold her event venues business for £21 million) opened the Pinkham Lighthouse – a community venue and 80-seater digital cinema – in an Edwardian theatre just around the corner. All profits go to an eco-village in South Africa. Opening the cinema was, Sally said, inspired by the tornado: it made her reassess her values. I went to a movie the other night, and half the street was there. We even help choose the films.

The camaraderie has continued. One of our neighbours is now teaching my husband Arabic; another is using me as a guinea pig for her training as a life coach, yet another offers babysitting. We’ve eaten in five different homes, there’s a street book club and a new sense of generosity. ‘If anyone wants a red geranium or pink rose plant, help yourself from my front garden,’ read a neighbour’s recent e-mail to residents. Of course it hasn’t all been good: even now I have recurring night terrors when, half asleep and heart racing, I think that if I get out of bed and put my foot on the floor, the house will explode. But despite this, my overwhelming sense is of the tornado having been a good thing.

Yes every cloud – even such a devastating one – has a silver lining.