Floods

I am on the taxi rank, and all around me it is raining hard.

I have just read a post on Facebook from Cumbria police, which carefully explains the difference between cars and boats, and helpfully suggests that if you think you have got the sort of transport which is not a boat then you stay at home.

I think that this is an entirely brilliant idea. I too have got the sort of transport which is not a boat but it is Saturday night, which is the night which pays our school fees.

It will not pay our school fees tonight.

It is unlikely to pay for the contribution to the form teacher’s Christmas present.

This is because all of the roads are closed. I cannot get anywhere at all further than about £4.30 away and in any case most people seem to have taken the police’s advice and stayed at home. In the middle of Bowness the silence is deafening apart from the steady patter of the rain and the occasional bellow of the wind.

I cannot even get around the corner to the local night club, because the lake has filled the road up to about knee depth, although fortunately I am not going to need to bother because the nightclub is closed anyway.

Of course we were expecting this, by the end of last night it was very clear indeed that today was not going to be a good day for a picnic. My last job was out to Underbarrow, at about half past three, and the rain was torrential. There were floods, and trees blown down, and it was not fun.

Most frightening of all was the journey back, when there were several trees down which had been upright on the way out, I had to get out into the lashing rain and try and drag part of one fallen monster aside a bit so I could pass, and I can tell you that the sound of the wind groaning through the branches, making dreadful threats of imminent crushing or impalement, made me jolly scared. I was very pleased to get home and not be dead.

We got up early this morning, partly because Elspeth had looked after Oliver last night and had activities of her own that she wanted to pursue, but also because we wanted to collect him whilst we could still get along the road.

Mark drove, because he is very good at this. He used to do rally driving in his youth, and it is all right to go with him even in the most awful conditions, because he knows how to get through anything.

There were enormous floods and dead cars all over the place. We stopped to help one poor lady whose car was marooned in the middle of an enormous puddle. Mark drove into the puddle and eased our car up behind hers and carefully pushed it out. He started it again for her but said that the air filter needed replacing and she had better leave it where it was until it was a bit drier, so we put it in the Hill of Oaks car park and took her back to her house.

We collected Oliver and made the slow journey back, we picked up a man whose car had also not made it through a flood and dropped him off in Bowness, and the rain continued to come down in steady torrents.

Eventually we made it back home, and Harry came round to play with Oliver, and they helped us decorate the Christmas tree and in between interesting bits buzzed off to play Nightmare Bloodbath Zombie Massacre on the computer, while the rain pelted down outside.

Decorating our Christmas tree is a major activity. It takes ages, because we always buy a couple of new decorations every year, usually when we are doing something that we would like to remember. There are things made by the children, and one or two particularly pretty bits of ribbon, and some decorations from my own childhood, and lights and tinsel, and of course chocolate, lollies and miniatures.

I think that a Christmas tree should be as bright and colourful as possible and also should feel abundant with wealth, so we hang as much chocolate on it as we can possibly manage. I like the chocolate with little fizzing bits in it, so we have got hundred and twenty little bars of it. Then there are fifty lollies and some miniature bottles of interesting things, like spiced rum and Glenfiddich whisky. We don’t ever eat all of it, or even most of it, and when the tree comes down we just put it in the tuck drawer and keep it all for emergencies, but I love feeling that there is so much that it doesn’t matter even if the dogs raid a few bits.

The dogs think that anything that lands on the floor is theirs by right, and have been sitting on guard by the tree hopefully ever since the first chocolates were hung on it. My dog was so excited when the first bit fell off that he barked in triumph before leaping on it with all four paws and carrying it off to hide under the kitchen table.

We put Bing Crosby on the music player and remembered old happiness as we unearthed one carefully tissue-wrapped memory after another, and laughed and sang whilst the rain hurled down outside, darkening the windows and bouncing off the path. Mark complained that the tree smelled of reindeer poo, which it does, but it doesn’t matter if you think about it as seasonal and exciting. Oliver and Harry ate lollies and got sticky, and suddenly it was all done.

Mark said it was a lovely thing that I had got no taste, and could just look at the tree and feel happy, and he was right, it is the best tree in the whole world, and the reindeer poo smell will go away in the end.

We went to work after that.

I am on the taxi rank now.

And still the rain comes down.