Goodness me, how it has rained.
It rained so much that I have not bothered going to work. Nobody gets in taxis when it is raining, because they just stay at home, but also there are floods everywhere and chunks of road that have been washed away.
I am now looking out of the window at what might qualify as being sufficient blue sky to manufacture some trousers for a Dutchman, but I don’t care. I have asked the Peppers if they would like to come round and eat curry and drink wine for dinner. Obviously they accepted, and hence I am writing this in haste, before they turn up. This is because the quality of the prose disintegrates really very quickly when wine has been added, a bit like putting lemon juice in milk.
You might have spotted a Pepper in the picture, by which I mean the one that is not all of the dogs. We did tell her not to sit on the grass, but she just would not listen.
The picture is blurred not because I could not hold the camera still, but because it was raining so hard it was like trying to take a picture through a waterfall.
Mark and Oliver went off to work, and when I had finished washing up bacon-sandwich debris, the dogs and I set off to the Peppers’ house for our morning constitutional.
This was delayed because of an unexpected deluge of water which was pouring in through their ceiling.
They explained that it had rained into their house, and it was next door’s fault for carelessly leaving the roof off his house.
I thought that this might be far too simplistic an explanation, and wondered if they might have a burst pipe.
We hunted for a bit, but could not see a burst pipe.
In the end we broke into the house next door, since their neighbour does not actually live there, and went for a look.
This sounds more excitingly rascally than actually it was. A screw on the outside was holding the yard door shut, so we unscrewed it and the door opened. Once we had got into the yard we could see that the neighbour had not only removed the roof, but most of the doors and windows as well, and what remained was a horrid wet hole with lots of building clutter.
I was very glad I was not the neighbour. I have owned houses like that and I can tell you from experience that it is most dispiriting.
We had an exciting clamber up a very wet hole where the stairs were supposed to be, and discovered that upstairs there was lots of water. It was cascading through the absence of roof, and hence into the next-door wall and eventually their ceiling and their living room, where it finished its journey in a collection of buckets, grumpily placed underneath.
They made such a fuss, fancy not wanting a water feature in your living room. I expect lots of the super-rich have got them, and I have always liked the idea very much, although I would have preferred a fountain. If it had to be a waterfall I would have gone for the sort with a stone mermaid and some coloured lights, because of my impeccable good taste.
We spent half an hour arranging plastic sheeting against the wall in the hope that the water would dribble down that and into the neighbour’s own house instead of the Peppers’ very nice bed and breakfast. They said that their guests did not like the showers to be actually in the bedrooms, but I think it is the guests’ own stupid fault for being too miserly to pay for five stars and valet parking, what do they expect?
The plastic arranging all sounds very simple and easy but in fact it was a horrid panic in a torrential downpour, sloshing over our heads and covering us with cement dust and water, all of which gushed down our sleeves and down our armpits into our trousers as we frantically tried to find ways of shoring plastic against the wall. Then Pepper, alarmed at being abandoned to her own devices, clawed her way up the almost-staircase, and whisked around our legs anxiously whilst we stumbled about tripping over things and trying to divert the streams of icy water anywhere but down the wall into the Peppers’ living room.
In the end we managed it, and it all poured through the light fittings and down the stairs, but we decided that was somebody else’s problem.
Pepper did not at all like the idea of going back down the absence of stairs, and had to be dragged bodily to the top and shoved, after which she slid, resisting with all of her might, to the ground, and then belted off into the back yard to tell Roger Poopy, who had not been brave enough to follow, all about it.
When we got back we examined the living room ceiling and decided with satisfaction that the water feature had slowed from a gush to a drip, and emptied a gallon or two of black water before next going to empty the dogs.
We sloshed around the sodden park, which was where I took the picture.
We were so utterly wet by then that none of us cared any more.
When I got home I wrung cement-water out of my underwear and chucked it all in the washing machine. We had a cup of tea before getting on with our day’s activities, and I am pleased to tell you that we resisted the idea of having a glass of wine there and then, although I was jolly tempted, I can tell you.
That was this morning.
I don’t need to resist any more.
