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.

A noise in the night

I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s still very dark.

There’s a tremendous noise outside. Somewhere between a drumming & a rustling. Is that yet another downfall? Or is it just the wind in the trees?

I don’t get up. Instead I find myself worrying about the fact my ironing lies in a bag on the utility floor. If there’s another downpour as there was on Monday night, my washing may be wet again.

I doze off again. Another time I wake up to the same sound. I tell myself if everything’s sodden there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Eventually, around 8am I get up. Sure enough there’s water along the edge of the lawn. I go into the utility room to feel the last of my washing. All is dry now, including the carpet. There’s been no flooding but nonetheless I lift the bag of ironing onto a higher surface just in case something happens before I get around to doing the ironing tomorrow.

Was it rain? Was it wind? Or was it just a dream, something imagined? I don’t know. Certainly the ground is very wet so I suspect it was rain. However the neighbour’s lawn is still green. The swing hanging in mid-air. So maybe it was a dream. These antidepressants I’m on for nerve end pain do seem to be conducive to heavy sleeping & vivid dreams, both good & bad.

A wet one

When the Fox came to bed Monday night he commented it had rained heavily during the night. The floor of the utility room might be wet.

When I got up, I saw puddles where the flower beds dip beside the lawn. I went into the utility room. My sandals didn’t squeak as they tend to on a wet carpet. All seemed dry. I tentatively put my bare foot on the carpet. Possibly a bit damp, more likely just cold & the damp from the damp air from the drying washing. I thought nothing more.

Then as I made my breakfast I noticed our neighbour was busy brushing just the other side of our wall. I went to investigate & say hello. He was brushing gallons of water to the drains. He’d been to work at the local power station, done the urgent work & returned home to mop up. He then pointed to the next garden. The whole large lawn was a lake. The seat of the children’s swing was floating on top.

The neighbour continued to tell me of other events. Apparently up the street they had had to call out the fire brigade to pump out the water from their house. Another person lost their electricity as the water mixed with the electric cables running under their house, fusing the lot. One person, who’d just put in new floor boards, checked underneath to discover the water was just 2 inches below. I blessed all the drainage we had had put in when we had the garden redesigned. Undoubtedly, as it was before, the lake would have covered half our garden & got into the utility room & garage. As it was all had disappeared except those few puddles next to the lawn.

Later in the day we went out. We discovered Lancaster had been flooded once more. Those poor people had only just mopped up after being flooded a couple of weeks ago. Some businesses had only just opened after repairs due to Storm Desmond.

And still the showers keep coming, though most of the surface water had drained away during the course of yesterday. I should think the local rivers such as the Lune will have broken their banks once more as the water runs in from all around. I just hope this isn’t a sign of the August to come.