I am so glad this didn't happen a year ago. In fact I'm also quite glad it didn't happen while we were in Hereford as I would have been quite miffed to miss it.
For every event like this there's a law that there should be an old codger who can remember the last time. Our local old codger (I believe the law requires them be stationed at distances of not more than one mile) says it was 1947. So, there you are.
Picture taken at 7.30 this morning, when the water was lovely and clear. Really quite beautiful, though now brown and muddy due to all the cars driving through it. There was already a high water mark at the end of the driveway, two feet from the waterline, showing how far it had got in the night. (The basement flat got flooded via the back route because the water treacherously came up the drain.) Friends and neighbours in the more immediate danger zone say the police were coming round at 3 or 4a.m. to clear them out, and someone on BBC Oxford living not too far from here reports water up to the level of his garden table. But we're secure in our second floor flat, and even if the electricity and gas fail then we will power the household devices through our own smugness.
We've been very lucky with water so far. We had two sunny days in Herefordshire, and to judge by the news we got out just ahead of the tsunami that went on to engulf the area between the Welsh Marches and the Cotswolds. Meanwhile a colleague from work reports that she spent two hours on Friday getting home due to floods in Steventon; an engineering friend stuck in the same traffic queue says there was "a lovely hydraulic jump right down the road." Just shows that to those with eyes to see there is always something to appreciate.
(Oh, and should anyone murmur that maybe I should have been kinder about the Thames in yesterday's post - well, so far it's the Ock that's flooded. The Thames may follow when Oxford's floodwaters reach us ... but that will just prove my point, as there's no better judge of character than how well someone can take a joke.)
D'you know, we have tasted the Ock's wrath this very weekend. (Well, not literally tasted, thankfully.) Drove up past your way to circumnavigate it in the end, but not before I'd sent the car through some really worryingly deep patches on the approach to Stanford-in-the-Vale. I have now decided that if you can still see road markings through it, it's not real flooding - hoo boy.
ReplyDeletePS - Kingston Bagpuss - tee hee!
I know. If I ever have a cat, that's what I'm calling it.
ReplyDeleteAfter hubris, comes nemesis...I think the poor-benighted population of Abingdon can float the blame for their current troubles on over to your door, Ben, after that baiting of Old Father Thames a few days back. Oh, yes...:)
ReplyDeleteI also poked fun at short people but I don't see armies of them besieging me with pitchforks and torches. Though maybe only because they can't get through the floods.
ReplyDeleteArgh Ben! Sorry that had to happen!! Flood damage sucks eh!! I've been looking on BBC World, etc, unbelievable the damage it's done!!
ReplyDeleteJG
ps. i've just started to read "The Xenocide Mission"