We've been here before..

But, yet again, life in Nowhere-on-Thames has begun to revolve around the "Thames" part.
On a daily basis, the Environment Agency's robot phones us to warn that we may have some flooding, and exhorts us to move our valuables upstairs, just in case.

TH has been more preoccupied than usual by this turn of events, as it's the time of year when we renew our house insurance. And, of course, this is the year when the Government has decided to save yet more money by ceasing to provide some support to insurers, and hence the insured, in the form of financial support in case of flood. He spent a long time on the phone to our current insurers, who in turn, very helpfully spent a long time on the phone to their underwriters, and in the end they called to say that they would indeed continue to insure us at fairly modest cost, despite the river Thames' frequent insistence on trying to move into our garden.


Although it still hasn't actually flooded here since the 1940's,  we are nevertheless seeing  the river creep closer and closer to the road, and after the road there's not a lot separating it from our house. 

For the second time in 3 weeks, the local golf course looks like this:

This is the fairway on the 16th..


Just up the road, the town of Staines recently officially changed its name to Staines-upon-Thames. A change they may now be regretting, as there is an increasing chance that they could, any day, become Staines-under-Thames, or Thames-upon-Staines.

Nowhere-IN-Thames….or « Should we build an ark ? »

It happens every time. No sooner has the Government-of-the-day or the water-authority-of-the-week declared that we’re in the grip of a drought, than we start to have downpours of biblical proportions. April showers? No, we’re sitting under something akin to a monsoon, with rain bouncing off everything, and it seems set to continue for the moment.  And this, only a couple of weeks after we were placed under drought measures here. 

TH was in boy scout mode when the impending drought measures were announced, and went straight out to buy a water-butt. Whilst applauding his initiative, I was a little disappointed to see that it was quite small. To be frank, it’s the sort of size that makes it a waste of time. There’s probably enough in it to water the garden a couple of times, and that’s it. However, it was duly installed, and, when I accidentally bumped into it the other day, water sloshed out of the top. This either proves my point, or means that we should definitely start to build an ark, as it’s only been in-situ for about three weeks..

Don’t misunderstand me, I know we need rain, that the water tables are alarmingly low and that we may yet all have to suffer further unless water supplies begin to creep back to normal. However, I am slightly selfishly concerned that Nowhere-on-Thames could, at any time, become Nowhere-IN Thames if the rains do not abate.

 Stranded people in N-o-T having their meals delivered by boat in 1947! Image from Thamesweb

Although the last time N-o-T actually flooded was in the 1940’s (and the local pub has photographs adorning the walls, showing slightly damp locals rowing boats around what, in drier times, is the village green) we’ve had a number of recent close shaves. A few years ago, the Thames rose far enough to sneak under a tunnel beneath the road up at the local golf club, and make its way back along the railway lines for some considerable distance. Apart from giving a rather dramatic display of sparks each time a train attempted to make its way past, this had the effect of placing us and our humble abode in the middle of an island in the Thames…It also spurred TH into amassing an impressive collection of sandbags, “just in case”, and me into moving all my scuba-diving equipment into one of the upstairs rooms.

 The local level crossing  in 2003..

Since then, flood defences have been built higher up the river. Which sounds good, until you understand that it’s not we, the inhabitants of Nowhere on Thames, who are being defended, but the posher, richer people (I might namedrop here, but Michael Parkinson and Rolf Harris aren’t exactly “A” list..) who live upriver in their Thames-side mansions.  Now, if there’s a flood alert, we’re not just getting our own extra water, we’re getting Rolf’s and Parky’s as well! On several occasions, the river has risen alarmingly, and TH has rushed around checking that his sandbags are still functional. Don’t imagine that I’m exaggerating the potential impact, or indeed the volume of water involved. It must be a lot: HM the Q  up the road has just finished having a huge Archimedes Screw installed in the nearby lock so she and the DoE can harness the might of the river to provide their weekend retreat with off-grid electricity!

Unless the current downpours start to ease, I am beginning to think that not applying for any Olympic tickets may have been a smart move. The rowing competitions may well be coming from our back garden..

Bringing down the barriers....Part 1

 My stay in Nowhere-in-France was, on the whole, uneventful, as I reported previously. Despite the cold, our little house had stood firm against the elements and (more importantly) so had the pipework, despite some obviously frozen pipes which refused to allow cold water to reach the upstairs bathroom for the first couple of days. Unfortunately, however, not everything had stood firm…

Arriving just before dusk on day one, my primary concern was to light fires and stuff. As I could see my breath indoors, this seemed like a plan. The neighbours had invited me over for dinner. In fact, they’d even offered me a bed for the night, should I have felt that sleeping in sub-zero temperatures in a house where the heating had only just been reinstated was too much. They reckoned without my girl-guide levels of preparation and my newly acquired bargain electric blanket. I was, dear reader, prepared to tough it out. Once I’d wrestled the electric blanket and its eight miles of attachment cord onto the bed, over and around the mattress and anchored it firm, I was already feeling a LOT warmer. Time to venture out and around the perimeter of our tiny French estate. (Don’t get excited. I can reach the perimeter in any direction in about five brisk strides). 

Before I could start my perimeter-striding, however, there was a knock on the door, and a rather sheepish-looking neighbour waiting on the threshold. We did the French kissy-kissy thing and exchanged greetings, and then my neighbour said “Have you seen your wall?”. I had, in the sense that it surrounds our house and garden, and thus is quite hard to miss, but as I hadn’t yet done my perimeter tour, I had to confess that whilst I could vouch for the wall being where I’d last left it, I hadn’t “seen” it in any more detailed manner.

“Well..” he went on “I had a bit of an accident yesterday. We didn’t think it was worth telling you by e-mail as you were about to arrive, but come and have a look”. He led me to the wall, where I saw that what I’d taken for a dirty mark on my way indoors was, in fact, a large and very visible crack. The closer we got, the more spectacular it looked. Once we were standing outside in the road and examining the damage, it was clear that the top section of the wall was almost entirely detached from the bottom along about 8 metres of its length.

“I was reversing the tractor with the bowser on the back, and trying not to let it slide on the ice” said my neighbour “And I thought I’d just hit the kerb. I don’t usually bring the bowser over, but with the cold, I was bringing everything closer to the house.” He went on to explain that he thought he’d just clipped the tiles on top of the wall, but on closer inspection he realised that he had come perilously close to demolishing the wall entirely! I felt quite sorry for him, but we agreed that things could have been worse, he and his tractor had survived unscathed, and the wall could be fixed. As his brother-in-law is a builder, and we both share the same insurance company, he promised to deal with the insurance and get a quote for the repairs, and I know that all will be well.

I attach for your delectation and delight a few snaps…

The Miraculous Expanding Jumper

The move from Nowhere-on-Thames to Nowhere-in-France went remarkably smoothly, all things considered. Probably the only tricky part was cramming all my thermal clothing – plus a newly-acquired electric blanket - into a tiny bag to beat the budget-airline baggage restrictions. This involved wearing a LOT of clothes, but the temperature was so low on my day of departure that it wasn’t a real hardship. The real hardship would have been getting up if I’d fallen over. I was wearing so many clothes that I would probably still be lying on the floor of Stansted airport departures, waiting for someone to either take pity on me or mow me down with one of those little electric buggy things, had gravity claimed me and dragged me to the floor.

There is something about managing to board a Ryanair flight with all the stuff you packed in your hand luggage that’s immensely satisfying. I was a bit concerned, and had practised, in my mind, exactly how I would strap the electric blanket to my body in the event that I was stopped and told that my hand luggage exceeded regulation dimensions. Frankly, I don’t know why I ever worry. I’ve flown to the other side of the globe for a fortnight with hand luggage, so visiting a house where I’ve already got plenty of clothes for a week is no problem. Except, of course, when the outside temperature has dropped to “arctic” and you’re having to call your thickest woollies into service. 

What I failed to factor into my plans, however, was the Big Thaw and the attendant massive increase in temperature which meant that I had no need to travel back dressed as if for a week in Siberia. This posed a problem, as my big jumper alone filled up all the space which had been occupied on the outbound leg by the electric blanket I was leaving in France. Not only that, but the jumper refused to pack flat. This, despite the use of one of those special plastic bags which allow one to expel all the air and thus condense one’s clothes into a sort of brick.

I eventually managed to cram the thick jumper into my bag, squeezed into a brick in the plastic bag. Sadly, the plastic bag began, only part way to the aircraft, to show distinct signs of no longer wishing to fulfil its role. This meant that as I edged forward in the boarding queue, my sweater and all the other clothes in my bag took it upon themselves to start spontaneously expanding….

I managed to reach the aircraft without drawing too much attention to myself, despite the fact that I was carrying a piece of hand luggage which seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and was discernibly growing as if someone was using a bicycle pump on it. I shoved it quickly into the overhead locker, and was pleased that the person who opened the locker on landing wasn’t knocked to the ground as my jumper and other items of clothing broke free from their plastic prison and resumed their normal shape and size before the eyes of the rest of the unsuspecting passengers.

Phew!

Oh yes…I bet you’re wondering how I fared in the cold-weather-one-upmanship competition? Well, it was minus 12^o  for a couple of nights, and below freezing for a day or so, but once I’d lit enough fires, I hardly noticed the cold. However, my trip was not without incident. I shall shortly bring you tales of broken walls, broken fences and a breakdown in international relations..

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye...

Tomorrow I’m off to France. If I ever get there. We’re in the grip of a cold snap. Well, it’s cold to us, but if you live in Siberia, then what we’re currently experiencing would probably have you reaching for a t-shirt and shorts. As it is, people across Europe are locked in competition. The mere mention of the current outdoor temperature wherever you happen to be produces a flurry of “Ha! That’s nothing, it’s minus 27 here and my tongue has just frozen to the roof of my mouth!” “Ha! Call that cold! I had to have my pyjamas surgically removed by the fire brigade this morning because they’d frozen to my body overnight!”

Not to be outdone, I’m heading for my house in the French countryside, where the heating is currently switched off and, according to the neighbours, the fridge has stopped working in protest, because it’s realised that the outside temperature in my kitchen has now fallen below the temperature inside the fridge itself and, being a French fridge, it has decided not to waste its time any further and gone on strike. The internet tells me it’s going to be around -10 to -12 C for the next couple of nights over there, and that the daytime temperatures are unlikely to rise above freezing. I could stay here in the relatively balmy south-east of the UK, where we are forecast a slightly warmer zero to +3 degrees, but then, in the “Who’s the coldest” stakes, I’d be out of contention. It’s a question of pride. Why, even TH has been in on the act. He’s spent the day in Zurich, and the first thing he said as I walked in the door tonight was “It was *&^* cold over there! Minus 10!”. 

Actually, I’m lying. The first thing TH said to me when I came home from work was “Grummmhungbruung”. Or something similar. Owing to his absence in Switzerland, you see, he has been unable to address the problem of his car. I discovered yesterday that his battery was flat, when the nice man from BT came to install our new superfast internet connection. The nice man needed to put up a ladder outside the house, but TH’s car was in the way. I offered to move it forward, which was when I discovered that the battery was flat. So, when I came home this evening at 9.30 pm, it was to find TH outside in the cold, removing the battery from his car so he could charge it. 

So, I’ll be back soon with tales of How I Survived the Cold. Unless I’m recovering from having my pyjamas surgically removed..

Oh, the “Grummmhungbruung” ?? It’s just the way TH talks when he’s holding a torch in his mouth.

If you wanna get ahead..

..get a hat! Or so the old slogan goes. Frankly, I have yet to find a hat that doesn't make me look like a demented bag-lady or a female Michael Crawford, so I tend to avoid them like the plague, even when, as today, there appears to be a wind blowing round Nowhere-on-Thames which has come directly from Siberia without passing go or collecting £200. I look marginally less like an escapee from a home for the bewildered with my hair being whipped into coconut matting around my head, so I set off for an afternoon stroll into the local metropolis, accompanied by TH, with my head exposed to the elements.

Once we'd arrived in the local metropolis itself, there were, as usual, hordes of tourists taking photos of just about everything and milling about the castle and the shops doing the normal tourist things. Given the prevailing weather conditions, I began to notice the extraordinary range of headgear they were sporting.

Now, I guess that, unless you come from somewhere colder than the UK, you're probably not going to think about packing lots of headgear for a few days' break, so if you decide to buy something once you're here, you may not have the luxury of a wide choice. Even so...

The first person to walk past us was a man, sporting a Sherlock-Holmes-style deerstalker. It sounded as though he was Italian. If, indeed, he WAS Italian, he clearly didn't get the memo about being stylish and casually elegant at all times, for he had actually managed to find a deerstalker lined with grey faux-fur fabric, and had decided to wear it with the ear-flaps down over his ears and tied under his chin. The overall effect was sort of Sherlock-Holmes-with-learning-difficulties.

Putting the "tit" in "titfer"?

                                                   
Then there seemed to have been a massive outbreak of those Peruvian bonnets which look OK-ish on trustafarians with dreadlocks, handknitted jumpers and Doc Martens, but which make Japanese tourists of a certain age look like they're wearing a tea-cosy for a bet. And I'm not convinced that any man over 30 can really pull off a hat with multicoloured faux-plaits. There's something of the transvestite about it.

Would you?

And then there are the Princess-Leia headphone-ear-muff-headbands which make the wearer look like they've got some terrible ear infection, but even worse, make them almost completely deaf. I worry that, when sported by a tourist who tends to forget which side of the road we drive on, this could become a lethal combo.

No, really.....why?????

All I can assume is that these people will get home with their inappropriate headgear and consign it to a dark corner of their wardrobe, never to be seen or worn again. I mean....when Brits used to go on holiday to Spain and come back with those sombreros the size of a manned spacecraft...they KNEW how stupid they looked wearing them, didn't they?