Flood Saturday

There are floods everywhere, courtesy of La Nina - the bad girl of world weather systems. On TV the tragedies of Brazil, Australia and Sri Lanka fill the screen. Here in Cumbria we too have once again been inundated by a huge storm coming in off the Atlantic. Weather warnings went out on Friday night and then became more particular on Saturday morning, with Appleby being the lead feed on Yahoo.co.uk news as well as on Sky and the BBC. Flood gates were closed to protect the town and the low-lying road alongside the river was also closed and sandbagged.

What it normally looks like

yesterday, beginning to flood

The mill is outside the town and can’t be protected. We just have to sit and watch the river creep towards the building and make sure that everything that might float away is tied down. The speed and menace of the water is horrifying; even knee deep you can feel it tugging at your legs to pull you down. I took photographs at around 4.30pm as it was getting dark, but high water didn’t happen until about 2am, so it was a long night. Fortunately, although we had 160mm of rain in only a few hours, the way it fell meant that we avoided catastrophic water levels.

The disappearing landscape

The biggest flood we’ve ever had, in 2005, had the river almost 20 feet (6.2 metres) above it’s normal height. Last night was probably only 2 and a half metres. So it penetrated into the lowest part of the ground floor and drowned the garden but didn’t threaten the structure. We had the windows securely boarded up to protect them from floating debris. This is obviously going to be the winter for extreme weather.

Snow and Rain in Italy

Snow fell in Italy before Christmas, in places where it doesn’t usually snow. Laura, who is 65 and has lived in this village for her whole life, can’t remember it ever snowing here - except perhaps the odd flake trickling down out of the sky on a very cold day. But just over a week ago, Tuscans - right down to the edge of the Mediterranean - came out of their houses to find the roads six inches deep in the white stuff. All great fun and very pretty. It only lasted a few days before it began to melt. And then on Christmas Eve it began to rain - and that’s where the trouble began.
Rain in the Tuscan Alps is never ordinary - you either get a light mizzle or you get the fully grown up version as seen in Hollywood movies with six fire hydrants trained on the set. So on Christmas Eve we stayed beside the fire and listened to it drumming on the roof and rushing down the gutters. Christmas Day was bright and dry and we didn’t have the TV on all day - or the computer. So when we went out on Boxing Day to take members of the family to Pisa Airport we were totally unprepared for what had happened.


Swollen with snowmelt and rain, all the local rivers, including the Serchio and the Arno, had broken their banks. The main autostrada to Pisa was underwater, the secondary ‘A’ road (SS Aurelia) was also flooded and the train line was under water too. The police had blocked off all the roads, but no one had thought to provide details of a diversion. We drove around for hours frustrated at every attempt by the flood water.

This isn't the river - this is a new channel cut by the flood across fields and through a raised flood dyke. Eventually we found a way through, by driving more than half way to Florence and then coming back across country in a nose-to-tail traffic jam that stretched for miles. We missed the plane, of course, and then had to find a way back. The route we had taken was closed by an accident, another was closed because the bridge was down ...... We made it home eventually, but a trip that would take 45 minutes each way normally, had taken us 8 and a half hours. Then, because their flight had been re-scheduled to the following day, we had to do it all again.....
Landslides up in the hills have caused even more problems, sweeping away roads that provide the only link for small communities. It will be months before the roads and railways are completely restored. The President of Tuscany has declared a state of emergency. It seems England isn’t the only country in Europe to have problems dealing with weather!

Cumbria's Floods

Here, from my safe vantage point in Italy, I 've watched the news anxiously wondering how friends are managing to cope. Some of them have had to leave their homes for the second time in a very short period. Last time the centre of Keswick flooded it was over a year before all residents got back into their homes. It's easy to overlook the devastation this is going to cause in people's lives. In a few weeks time it will no longer be news, but the displaced residents will still be living in temporary accommodation and businesses may well be closed until Easter or beyond.

Many people no longer have insurance (we don't) and after this flood, those who do will find that it's been withdrawn. This is going to have a terrible effect on businesses like the one above. The book trade is difficult enough - many rely on Christmas as their big earner. Cockermouth was lucky to have one of the last independent bookshops in the county - a wonderful place to browse - author friendly and very pro-active in supporting book-related events. It made me very sad to see the picture above. Only one image to represent many, many altered lives.

The Year of the Floods - Again

It seems unfair to be sitting in warm Italian sunshine, while my home county is under-water and the lead feature on the international news. It’s been an anxious time - we live in an old mill on the banks of a big river and it floods regularly. Before we left we stripped everything out of the ground floor, just in case the water rose high enough to come inside. And on Thursday it happened. A series of telephone calls as the river rose. Appleby on the news as residents filled sandbags and evacuated their belongings, expecting the Noah-style inundation we had in 2005 which almost reached the ceilings and made thousands of people homeless across Cumbria.

You can see from the picture the force of the water powering its way through windows and doors - the lintels of two windows are just visible. The wreckage left behind can be seen from outside in the photo taken next morning.

This time, it only flooded the ground floor of the mill (which is raised up about four feet above the river) to a depth of six inches, leaving a mess of mud and river debris. Appleby's riverside shops and houses were also flooded, though it escaped the worst of the weather. Other towns and villages weren’t so lucky and some of our friends are homeless again only five years since they were last flooded out. Neil has gone home, while I watch the internet news with disbelief at the scale of the flooding.

Living as we do with the rising and falling of the water, we’ve got used to compromising with it. I don’t grow anything in the garden that doesn’t survive being under-water. We don’t use the ground floor except in summer. We park our cars at the top of the hill as soon as it begins to rain. And, although it washes away my garden soil and floats off anything not tied down, it also brings gifts.
Last winter it left two beautiful

'accidental' sculptures on the weir. One a branch like a water sprite, trailing her arms in the water; the other a tree-stump like the head of a beast. They stayed there for a couple of months before the river rose again, carrying off the naeid, and moving the ‘beast’ up onto the river bank next to my garden.

There he’s remained all summer like a primitive carving - a god of the river - looking at me every time I glance out of the window. I suspect, after the water levels of the past few days the river will have moved him on, perhaps to dump him in someone else’s garden and I will be very, very sorry.

CAMBODIA BY BUS

So here we are embarking on a 10 hour bus journey across Cambodia. We're travelling up from Sihanoukville in the far south, to Siem Reap in the north and quite close to the Thai border. Apparently the land around it actually belonged to Thailand until quite recent times.
The road goes through the straggling outliers of the Elephant Mountains which are covered in rainforest and cobwebbed by mist. In the valleys between there are rice paddies, single tall palm trees like rows of floor mops, water buffalo wallowing in pools among the pink and white lotus flowers, and stilt houses high above the flood water, all along the road. There's a piglet on a leash tied to the leg of one of them. A stall beside the road advertises itself as the 'Any Book Store', but the shelves are filled with cigarettes and Fanta cans. There aren't many books in Cambodia - looking for one for our little grandaughter either in Khmer (her preferred language) or English was a frustrating experience.
The bus has one or two europeans on it, but mainly Khmer or Chinese passengers. The battered screen at the front is showing the Khmer equivalent of a bollywood movie. There's a shrine to the gods who protect travellers under the television with little offerings and joss sticks. It's obviously needed. We try not to look out of the front window at the four lanes of traffic coming towards us on a two lane road, while the bus is overtaking a moto. Somehow everything avoids everything else and we hope it stays that way.

We stop every couple of hours for drinks and food and the stretching of cramped legs. Immediately food vendors gather round the bus selling banana fritters, french bread, small birds on skewers we'd rather not try to identify, boiled eggs (chick still in) and a range of drinks. Neil tries the fritters, but I'm sticking to things in packets, fresh fruit and ring pull cans. The standard of food hygiene in Cambodia is very low.

At one of the stops an itinerent european musician (his accent is vaguely New Zealand) gets on with various musical instruments strung about his body. He has a goatee beard and is wearing an akubra hat and quite a lot of jewellery. Within ten minutes of taking his seat he is already in conversation with the 'Single Female Traveller' of a certain age sitting three rows back. We hope he isn't pestering her, but later in Siem Reap see them sitting together outside a bar, so presumably his chat-up lines were acceptable!
The further north west we go the more water we see. In places the road has been washed away by this year's intense monsoon and is down to one lane. The dead leaves of the banana palms hang limp where they've been submerged in water. We can see in some places that the field boundaries have been washed away and the rice crop lies flat in the water like fields of wheat after a tornado. There are rumours of an anticipated humanitarian crisis. Several charity vehicles pass us on the road and just outside Siem Reap the UN World Food Programme have erected a tent village.

We are both rather sore and stiff when we reach Siem Reap, but very glad to have seen so much of the country from the windows. You don't get this view from the plane! It's too dark tonight to see any temples, so that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Now is the time to beware of the Rain!

What terrible weather we had yesterday! It was raining like Noah's flood, and so dark inside we had to have the lights on. Working upstairs in my office, I could hardly hear myself think for the wierd rhythms the rain was drumming on the roof. And it made me feel strange; excited, restless and very wide awake. But also rather melancholy. I kept thinking of Katherine Mansfield's journal entry;

‘Late in the evening, after you have cleared away your supper, blown the crumbs out of the book that you were reading, lighted the lamp, and curled up in front of the fire - that is the moment to beware of the rain. You are conscious of a sudden hush. You open your eyes wide. What’s that? Hullo, it’s raining! Reluctant at first, and then faster and faster, tapping against the window, beating on the door, comes the rain. The air seems to change; you are so aware of the dark flowing water that your hands and cheeks grow cold. You begin to walk up and down. How loud the rain sounds! ..... You remember that the kitchen window is wide open. Is the rain coming in? No, not really. You lean out a moment. Two little roof gutters flow into the garden. In the dark they sound like two women sobbing and laughing, talking together and complaining and laughing, out in the wet garden. One says : “ Life is not gay, Katherine. No, life is not gay.” '



About 5 o'clock the river, which had been roaring past like a brown jet-stream, suddenly fell silent as the water level rose high enough to be above the weir. And then it began to creep over the river bank towards the house, drowning the himalayan balsam and the loosestrife, until even the bullrushes were up to their necks. It was more than a foot deep over our front garden and the only way out was to wade through it. We stayed put, watching its advance, listening to the rain and wondering when it was going to stop.


This is my front drive!




This morning there is mud everywhere and wellingtons are the essential footwear. The water didn't come high enough to get onto the ground floor (which is elevated above the river bank), but the level of the flood was unprecedented for the summer months. Winter flooding is a regular feature of life here. On a sandstone pillar, beside the river bank, the occupants of the mill have recorded flood levels, with dates, for hundreds of years and several of the highest marks have been in the last forty years. Now it's something we're going to have to watch for in summer as well as winter.