One problem after another

It is after midday. Our gardener arrives. She usually comes in the morning so this is late for her. I soon discover why she is late. Through her tears she tells me how she’d spent the morning.

Her daughter had had her house broken into during the night. She’d come downstairs in the morning to discover the place was in total disarray & she’d been robbed. Her daughter & baby had been asleep throughout, not hearing a thing. Our gardener had spent the morning trying to calm down her daughter (who is only in her early twenties & suffers from bi-polar, living on her own for the first time ever), get on to the landlady to sort out improved security, arrange for the police to come to investigate, take fingerprints etc.

Now her daughter is terrified of being on her own. She fears what might have happened if the thief had come upstairs. Would they back another time & this time rape or beat her up, or injure the baby? Her anxiety was being felt by the baby who now is screaming the house down. The thief had emptied every drawer downstairs, been through her handbag taking her cash notes – they left the small change & bank cards – so now the daughter feels she has been thoroughly invaded. Like so many people on low incomes – she depends on state benefits – she hasn’t got any contents insurance so what‘s gone is well & truly gone. Her only consolation is that she hadn’t got around to buying the new laptop she needed for the Open University course she’s hoping to start soon. She’s still waiting for the bursary to come through to afford it.

I think our gardener arrived here as much because it is a safe haven where she can relax a bit & leave her worries behind for a couple of hours. I suspect too she appreciates having someone she can offload some of her anxieties on to without fear of censure or upsetting the other too much.

I can only hope by next week she will have some better news.

I meanwhile tried to distract her with tales of our flooding.

I was bemused on Thursday when United Utility, our water suppliers, came round to check if we needed pumping out. I’m on their list of disabled people who might need help in a crisis. It is noticeable they only checked on people who had house members who might be on such a list. They were surprised when I told them we had no flooding here. They asked how we’d managed that. I assured them we’d had two huge soakaways installed under our garden when we had it re-designed a few years ago. They were impressed. While they were here they checked all the sewers & street drains in case another deluge arrived. Hopefully that will not happen. It’s nice to know, though, in a real crisis help would be on its way.