Floods...

Floods? We never heard of them before July 21^st. It rained solidly for 2 days – not flash flooding, just heavy continuous rain. All the same, I thought we’d got away with it and when I saw the shop on the Saturday morning it was dry – apart from a small puddle of water on the floor. Mind you, the village was flooded and the water outside in the street was about an inch from the door. The puddle, I assumed, was splashed in through the door by passing traffic – I was wrong – it was rising up through the parquet floor from the pressure of a rising water table, and the more we mopped up the puddle the more the water came through.

Fortunately our site is on a slope, it only affected the front part of the shop, and here it only rose to about ¼”. Even so, that’s enough to wreck a wooden floor so we will be closing in January for a few weeks while the floor is replaced.

Many others in the village came off far worse. It was quite a sight to experience - some streets with so much fast flowing water that you couldn’t walk across them without your feet being taken from under you. But being well up river the problem was short lived and within 4 hours the water table had dropped and by the evening you would never know that anything had happened – until you looked inside the houses!