SO… HOW WAS YOUR STORM…? (PART TWO)

Because you knew that I spoke too soon.

I thought that we'd got off far too lightly, and that I was tempting fate by saying so, but the second phase of the big storm did inflict some damage upon us after all.

A tiny, almost insignificant amount in the great scheme of things. A barely perceptible blip in the not-so-great ongoing and unfolding tale that is my life. Something barely worth mentioning, really, but, because these pages have a nasty habit of confessing all, and mentioning absolutely everything, I'm still going to mention them anyway, despite the fact that bringing up something so trivial when other people are suffering such hardship and loss smacks of the tactless and thoughtless at the very least, and swings precariously towards the utterly crass...

Inevitably we have still been very lucky, not least because, when the storm came back for another go, two days after that first devastating visitation, I had the option to choose not to actually venture outside to go to work during the second phase, but instead set up at home and do whatever my thing is from there whilst listening to the raging, howling wilds, and the harsh blattering of the raindrops and the hailstones as they beat down onto the slates on my roof.

So that damage...

It really was not a massive amount at all, but was more of an irritation and a bit of a worry, if the truth were being told. It was certainly nothing devastating enough to make the six o'clock news or anything like that, but there are consequences and, unfortunately, they are consequences which will have to be dealt with.

When I got up on Saturday morning, with the rain still blatting down, I thought that I heard an ominous dripping sound coming from beyond the drawn curtains. Now, normally, this would not bother me. Quite regularly we hear the dripping noises as remnants of rainstorms hang on to the stones and the pipes and the PVC until they find the gravity of their situation impossible to resist and they freefall down towards a splashy oblivion, and usually, despite the volume of the sound they make during their death throes, they are actually outside and doing us little harm.

However, when I opened up the living room curtains, this time it was different, because there it was; That telltale puddle of water on the window sill letting me know that the rain was actually getting in.

This, of course, meant an immediate panic followed by a rapid rush around the house looking for the old towels I used when the washing machine leaked last year to mop up this growing pool, before digging out a couple of buckets and other receptacles to catch the bigger drips which were now squeezing their way through the masonry with alarming regularity and which did seem to get more persistent as the morning progressed.

Of course, thinking about it rationally later, I did come to believe that it was just that the stone lintel above the window was so saturated with water that it had nowhere else to go.

Happily, later on in the day, as I was putting out the bins, I ran into our local builder and asked him to take a quick look, and he pointed out those barely noticeable cracks in the mortar between the stones which was probably normally allowing the slowest of seepage, but the effects of which had been exaggerated by the unprecedented scale of the recent torrents.

Anyway, after a bit of negotiation and discussion, and if all goes according to plan, he thought that a little bit of pointing should probably solve the problem and so, if he remembers, that might actually get done if he gets a free moment and the weather clears for long enough.

Throughout the weekend, further rainstorms, ones which were mostly pointing in other directions, came and went, and, luckily for us, the dripping didn't persist, despite me having gone out and bought one of those large "under bed" storage boxes to catch the drips because it fitted more snugly onto the window sill than all those buckets did, and covered more of the problem area...

So there you are... Another non-tale of woe. Please feel free to roll your eyes in disbelief and share your tales of true hardship with me any time you like.

After all, that, in its small and slightly inconvenient way was my storm, but I was really asking how yours went...