Man the lifeboats!

We had the most extraordinary storm yesterday evening, quite short but possibly the most extreme in the seventeen months since I’ve been here. It started off quietly enough, if any thunderstorm can be described as ‘quiet’, with lightening flashes and loud rumbles of thunder, but as I was watching it, the satellite TV system signal gradually weakened until it disappeared altogether. Then the rain really started pounding down with a vengeance. I’ve never seen so much rain falling in such a short period of time. I checked the chimney and was delighted to find that no rainwater was dripping down, so then I checked on my back lounge door against which the deluge was beating feeling pretty sure that at least some would be coming in, as it did once before a few months ago. But no, it was still dry.

I then went into my kitchen and was aghast to see a flood of rainwater rushing in under my door. I couldn’t just leave it so had to open the door to find out what the heck was going on. By this time the wind was whipping around outside and the rain was lashing down and I soon saw what was happening. As things are at present, my back door is only just above the level of the ground outside, which is itself below the level of my front lawn. The result is that whenever it rains very hard, the water drains off the lawn, runs down towards my back door and then drains away in a small river along the front of the house until it gets to a low point where I park my car, where it can drain away. But yesterday evening it couldn’t do that. The reason was that half of the leaves have now fallen off the old lime tree that stands on the lawn above my back door and they were so thick on the ground that they were creating an impenetrable barrier for the water that could therefore form a rapidly deepening pool outside my back door until it eventually rose above the level of both the door threshold and my floor tiles.

As soon as I realised what was going on, I had no choice but to dash outside in the howling wind and rain and use the broom that I’d been swooshing the water out with to clear away as many of the leaves as possible, to allow the water to escape. Luckily, while I was doing so the rain abated slightly and even though I was under the spread of the tree branches, I still got pretty soaked. But I was successful and even though the rain continued, when I’d done, the water was able to flow away without coming into my kitchen.

But it turned out that this was a false dawn! When I returned to my lounge, I found that its far end was now under water with more pouring in by the minute. This was a completely new experience as nothing similar had ever happened before. At that end of the house, there is a door into my lounge that is a bit superfluous being as there’s a door into the kitchen at the other end, and which a previous resident had nailed up. Just as laying a proper path outside my back door and along the front of my house is on my list of ‘jobs to do’, so is removing the lounge door, bricking it up and making it into a window to match the other one between my kitchen and lounge. But yesterday evening it was too late for that! Somehow an enormous stream of water was finding its way in under the door even though it’s some way above the ground level at that end in comparison with the door into the kitchen. There was only one thing for it – move the furniture that was in the affected area, which was not that much fortunately – and then grab a mop and bucket.

Although by this time the storm was beginning to abate, I then spent almost the next hour mopping up. I filled up the large plastic bucket that came with the mop and had started on the next one before I at last got the better of it, but that was still not the end of things. The water had run right along the joints of the tiles from the lounge end of the house into the kitchen and by that time had got under the cartons of the new kitchen cabinets that I haven’t yet installed, which I’d left leaning against the kitchen wall. This was a potential major disaster, because if they took up enough water for it to begin penetrating the material of the units they contained, the units themselves could be destroyed. There was only one thing for it – I had to stop mopping and move the units to somewhere dry, which ironically turned out to be the fireplace, which had previously been one of the dampest places when it had started to rain! But now it was a ‘life-saver’.

The storm eventually moved away into the distance to the south-east all the while still crashing, banging and flashing, leaving me to clear up behind it. ‘Thank goodness for having floor tiles all the way through downstairs’, was my main thought, because after mopping up, there was no harm done. When I got up this morning, the windows were a bit steamed up on the inside, but that soon cleared and it’s now clear and bright, albeit a bit windy. I have no idea where yesterday evening’s storm came from – it hadn’t figured in any weather forecasts, none that I’d seen anyway – and although that isn’t unusual, it’s ferocity was certainly a big surprise. At the time of writing, a deep low is forming out in the Atlantic which is forecast to bring extremely powerful, hurricane force winds into the south of England, on a par with, or even more powerful than those of the 1987 storm that I remember very vividly. I hope that that isn’t so for the sake of the many who will be affected tonight and tomorrow as the 1987 storm was a traumatic experience and the damage left in its wake was considerable and visible for many years afterwards. Whether our storm yesterday evening was a precursor for what’s to come I don’t know, but it was certainly a bit traumatic while it was in progress and I feel lucky today to have come out of it more or less totally unscathed. And even though the winds were whipping around quite viciously out there, I’m pleased to say that the slab I placed on top of my chimney doesn’t look as though it moved even a millimetre 😉