I have two days a year when I work at home, one to plan how to spend £750K the Local Authority laughingly call a budget, and one in which I attempt to write the words "could do better" on 280 ways on 280 reports.

Friday was the latter.

I was sat is a beautifully sunny conservatory, laptop where it should be, tapping away, when the phone rings.

It's pouring down. And thundering. And we're flooded.

I leave them alone for five minutes and this is what they do to me.

Don't even try to come down and help, the road's cut off. We've swept the water away, and it's okay.

Ish.

All this is happening 8.2 miles away and I'm still sat in bright sunshine.....

Cut to today, we've seven carpets to be ripped up, two classrooms flooded and the sewers have backed up leaving a distinct niff of poo in the air. we resemble nothing on earth, the kids are off and we've got a school to ready for God Knows When.

The Local Authority will "get back to me", Health and Safety "out" and phone lines everywhere "engaged" we've got a two day full industrial clean to organise and it's still raining. This will involve lots of men in rubber gloves and vaccuum cleaners letting off disinfectant bombs to rid the air of poo spores so that my little girl with Cystic Fibrosis can return safely to school.

Meanwhile, three small boys (alright, me, the deputy & the caretaker) are forming a dam across the playground to divert the mini-tsunami that is pouring across it and heading in the general direction of Our Carpets. We manage to divert the torrent into an open drain with a certain degree of success, and an awful lot of fun!


So I'm sat at home recounting the story to Mrs Nick when the doorbell goes. It's the girl from two doors away who used to have bunches and play in the mud with Alex. Except I haven't seen her in years, she's grown up and gorgeous, works for the local radio station (LINCS FM) and wants to interview me.

So that's how I ended up being interviewed on my settee by a lovely girl and being featured on tomorrow's lunchtime LINCS FM news.



And you reckon nothing exciting happens on this forum?



Hah!

Yesterday was the first time I felt glad I've moved out of Yorkshire. My Dad's village is at the top of a hill, but all three exits are flooded so nobody can get in or out now!

Hull is just as bad - it took my Mum over four hours to get home from work - she almost sailed some of the way home, and at other times the water level was up to the door handles on her car. Remarkably, it didn't leak!

At least they don't have any sort of a clean up job on their hand - Nick, I have the utmost sympathy for you.

That sounds hideous, Nick. But thank goodness it's not your home. You can get away to somewhere that (presumably) doesn't smell at the end of the day.

And this will be something your kids will remember forever, which (as long as none of them have been hurt) is a good thing. There isn't much of primary school I can remember vividly, and most of what I can is all annoyingly muddled up and I can't remember what happened when. Except the day of the big storms in 1990, when I can recall almost everything from 4pm onwards, and in the right order.

We were waiting for the bus and I was bus prefect so I made everyone take their hats off so they wouldn't blow away (although I'd have liked them to blow away cos they were stupid hats). But in the end we couldn't go home because the double decker bus was too tall, so we watched Neighbours in the school library and then a coach arrived and a friend told tall tales about blue-ringed octopuses all the way home. Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if that wasn't two separate occasions now. Bum. I take it all back.

Is everybody else all right?

Crikey! What a story.

I didn't realise you had a girl with CF. My cousin had that, it's a horrible thing and I know the details of it all too well.

I just spent five days in mud at Glastonbury, incidentally, and didn't complain once (unlike a lot of lily-livered people that frequent the web) and tales like this remind me why. There's far more important stuff going on...

Errrm, except that this is the second time it's happened to some of them......

You know that thing about lightning never striking the same place twice?

That's crap, that is!

Actually, it's great fun with insurance claims for something like this, because you're not fiddling anyone, but you HAVE to have new stuff, because of the H&S risks to children.

My staff have been like kids in a sweetshop today, but they deserved to be, as the place flooded again overnight so we had to start mopping up all over again.

God ought to try posting THAT on the Joke thread and see if I laugh.

Or Not!!!!


We'll be open Thursday, providing lightning doesn't straaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! :lol:

Blimey. I've no idea how you manage to keep a sense of humour about it. Y'r a better man than me, I'd have been raging around like a bull in, erm, Pamplona. Yes.

I'm running very short on analogies. Blame the fact that, in the past day and a half, I've cleared my living room, destroyed a sofa and chair with my bare hands and a hammer, searched the whole of this bit of south-east London and the little bit of Kent that borders in the hope of finding a carpet cleaner for hire, finding said carpet cleaner and deafening myself with it, helping my housemate pack a year's worth of accumulated crap into her ludicrously small car and clearing out all of the crap that my housemates left in the kitchen.

All of this before attempting to clear my own room, which looks like this...



...before my dad comes to pick me and all of my stuff up in the morning.

Not meaning to derail this topic, that came out as a bit of a rant, sorry. :lol:

You've certainly made a good job of recreating that "debris swept in on a wave of dirty water" look.

The words "analyse this" spring immediately to mind... :D

Errm......how old are you????????

I think the only difference between that and my school is that we had poo in the water.

On the other hand........

Um... 23. :unsure:

I got it all sorted by about 6:30am, having worked solidly (on that, the kitchen, the living room, the sofas, etc) for about 21 hours.

Good man! nice to see a few old fashioned virtues still exist.

Mind you, youth of today, when I were a lad etc etc (disappears up own @rse) :P

Heh, yeah, the way I work is pretty strange... basically I can keep going for a ludicrous amount of time when I want to, as long as I don't stop. If I stop and relax for a few minutes, it tends to go to hell in a flurry of distractions and laziness.