Well, here’s a first, or very nearly. We were invited out to dinner last night by someone who is not a family member. Rachel, from Whitethorn Farm (Carey Organic), had extended the invitation, but it is so unusual to be asked to dinner that we had to check with Martin just to make sure.
Evidently, it was true. We were as excited as kids at Christmas, knowing that someone else was going to be doing the cooking and all we had to do was to sit down and eat. That’s what I call civilised.
The weather yesterday was not good. Rain was the predominant feature of the day, becoming more intense as the afternoon faded into dusk. By the time we left for Whitethorn Farm, a monsoon had descended, turning Laskett Lane into a torrent once more. The road gullies were blocked within minutes and three or four inches of water were sloshing around the bit of Aspen House occupied by Sal’s parents. We just hoped that the repair work done after last July’s floods would hold up. There would of course have been nothing we could have done about it if it didn’t hold up, but I am pleased to say that no ingress of water was detected. Cheers, Simon, you did a good job there!
Leaving our yard, we drove through the small river that had materialised outside the house and headed for Carey. The usual low spots in the road were already flooded, and several angry brown waterfalls were rushing down the steep ground to the left of the road and gushing horizontally across the road at roughly the height of the top of the wheel arches on the car. Over the brow of the last hill before the descent to Carey, we were once more in a river. Turning left to go up to the entrance of Whitethorn Farm, we were then driving up a river, and then down another one as we went down their driveway. Parking as close as we could to their door, we still got pretty wet just dashing to the safety of their porch.
It has to be said that one monsoon, as we had last July, can be described as freak weather. Two is unusual, three is a bit worrying and any more than that is probably climate change. Rain of that density is now a regular occurrence. After last night’s rain, the river has flooded again this morning, which makes it about the eighth time this year that fields have been under water. The river also seems to be running at a permanently higher level than I have seen it since we moved here, so any bout of heavy rain is much more likely to cause it to flood very quickly. Oh well, it gives the Flood Agency another excuse to phone people in the middle of the night to tell them to retreat to higher ground.
And the dinner? The dinner was great. A zero food miles meal all made with vegetables taken straight from Martin and Rachel’s rather large garden – and a meal that we didn’t have to cook!