I know I promised not to go on and on about the weather, but good grief it has been diabolical lately.  I'm sitting up late, unable to sleep due to a horrible cold that made me sleep on and off for most of the day, and I've just listened to the single worst Shipping Forecast I have ever heard,.  Thank heavens I'm not actually at sea - I usually ( Read more... )

I'm still signing on for unemployment benefit, and this week they had booked me into a two-day course to improve my chances of finding work. I had been dreading this, mainly because I was afraid of being late for it, having fallen out of the habit of getting up early, and was not too keen on the whole idea of the damn course anyway. I got up in ( Read more... )

Woke up genuinely bright and early yesterday, getting washed and dressed by 6.30 without any major trauma. Then I went into the living room/kitchen to get breakfast, and found that the roof had leaked catastrophically in the night, and the whole room was about an inch deep in water. Bugger. The drain on the terrace had blocked, and after the ( Read more... )

Last night's threatened storm surge seems to have not been nearly as bad as expected, thant God, although the tides are still pretty high, and Great Yarmouth did get some flooding. I expect there will be more flooding through the winter. What is most feared is a repeat of the 1953 floods, when hundreds of people in Essex were drowned in their ( Read more... )

The weather has gone mad again, with torrential rain and gales over most of the country. According to the news, "most of Sheffield is still under water", and a dam somewhere in the north is just about to burst. So no hosepipe ban this year, I suppose. Here, the weather hasn't been quite as bad as that, although we have had a lot of rain and very ( Read more... )