Always take the weather with you
Sorry for the lack of updates and replies to comments - I was caught up in the flooding.
I was down in Herefordshire for James and Penny's long-awaited wedding, with wormwood_pearl, hobbitz, half_of_monty, benparker, and sundry Light Entertainers without Livejournals, some of whom I hadn't seen for years. Getting down was the usual chaos of delayed trains, points failures and so on, but actually we were pretty lucky - a mere twenty minutes' delay from Glasgow, whereas the people coming from London were all delayed by several hours due to the horrendous traffic.
[Odd thing - in the pub on the first night, we noticed that out of eight of us, two already had doctorates, four were working towards them, one was planning to apply once she had her first degree, and the only one with no prospect of becoming a doctor had done published scientific research in an industrial context. Considering we met via theatre, I find this significant. And we found steerpikelet's ideal book lying about in the same pub.]
We awoke on the morning of the wedding to solid rain. Alanis Morrissette started up on permaloop in my head. After a massive (but rather too early) breakfast and some hanging about, we caught a hair-raising taxi to the church at about 1.30 - even by that stage, half the roads around the B&B were closed, and we had to take a circuitous route, occasionally going through puddles and crossing our fingers that the taxi would make it. We arrived about twenty minutes before the service was due to start, to be met by a grinning James at his most Wodehousian in a morning coat and fob watch. The rain was, if anything, getting harder: Rhi and I nipped over to the toilet in the village hall, and on the five-minute walk there got soaked to the skin. Fortunately (?), we had plenty of time to dry off - the bride didn't turn up on time. So we waited for her... and waited... and watched as the field outside the church filled up with water. When the bride eventually turned up (having had to commandeer a Land Rover instead of the low-slung Morgan she'd been planning on using, and at one point considering abandoning the Land Rover for a tractor when the water came over the bonnet) she was around an hour and a quarter late, though I don't think anyone minded!
The service was great. As well as readings from Isiah and the Song of Solomon, we also had a 4th century Latin grammarian and P.G. Wodehouse - no prizes for guessing who chose which. By what James assured me was a spectacular coincidence, all of the readings (and the sermon) featured water as a major theme.
Then ho to the village hall (with a lift in someone's car this time, thank goodness) for the reception. Champagne was poured, photos were taken, and then indoors for the meal (mmm, sausages...) and speeches - a decent effort from Penny's father, an excellent speech by James, and a rather stilted one from the best man. All this time, the rain had been continuing to beat down, and we were starting to worry if we'd be able to get home. After the meal broke up, Duncan and hobbitz and wormwood_pearl and I went for a walk to assess the extent of the flooding - deep puddles blocked the roads in every direction. By now it was clear that we were going to be spending the night in the hall. But we were warm and dry and had food and drink and good friends and party atmosphere, so frankly, who cared?
James was a tower of strength throughout - dashing about organising evacuation via tractors for the very young and the infirm. "Not quite how I'd planned on spending my wedding night", as he ruefully commented during a brief lull.
Listening to the radio, it became apparent just how lucky we were - though we ourselves were high and dry, Ledbury seemed to be at the centre of the flooding, and all around us people were trapped or flooded out - the people who were trapped in their cars overnight without food or water on the M5, for instance. We were buzzed a couple of times by Chinook helicopters looking for someone to rescue.
wormwood_pearl and I crashed out under a tablecloth at around 1am, and got up again at around 7 to help with the washing up and have some cake for breakfast. A worryingly underslept benparker had left in his car at about 6am as soon as the roads became briefly clear, and he returned at about 8 to fetch the remaining Light Entertainers. We tied a few cans to the 4x4 the wedding couple had borrowed for their escape, and headed back to the B&B, stopping off at Tescos to buy some food and the new Harry Potter book :-)
Best wedding ever, frankly.
Back at the B&B, we started to try to work out how we'd get home. There were no trains from Ledbury in the direction we wanted to go, and the traffic reports on the news were a self-contradictory litany of road closures, tailbacks and floods. Lacking the money to stay another night, we needed to get away, and fortunately benparker was going to Oxford and had space in his car. Oxford is, of course, where my family live, so after a quick call to check it was OK to stay with them, we set off. I probably wasn't very good company, because I had my nose buried in Harry Potter for most of the journey! We spent a few hours driving past flooded fields, and trying to decipher the traffic reports - Ben had lent his map to someone on the grounds that he had a sat-nav and didn't need it, and this made it hard to get any kind of overview. Except for the time when we were told that the road we were happily driving down was closed due to flooding. But it was a fairly uneventful journey, apart from leaving wormwood_pearl's bag at a coffee shop in the Cotswolds :-(
Oxford had been hit by the flooding too (no surprise there - it floods every winter anyway), but the bit where my parents live was basically fine (unlike whyoftheworld's ancestral manse, which had its ground floor flooded out). The trains north were down, though, so we were stuck at home for a couple of days. The horror, the horror :-) On Monday, the trains to Birmingham opened again, and the run-off from the hills meant that the waters around Oxford started to rise again, so we scarpered North hastily.
All in all, we were incredibly lucky. To quote lesslucid, "the best kind of natural disaster is the low-grade, not-very-disastery kind, where you get involved a little bit in the excitement of the possibility of natural forces spiralling out of control, but without having to cope with the consequences of natural forces actually spiralling out of control", and that's just what we had. Shout-outs and fingers crossed for all of you who caught it more severely, and especially whyoftheworld, mrkgnao and norm77, who (when last heard of) were flooded out, liable to be flooded out at any moment, and unflooded but without running water.
I was down in Herefordshire for James and Penny's long-awaited wedding, with wormwood_pearl, hobbitz, half_of_monty, benparker, and sundry Light Entertainers without Livejournals, some of whom I hadn't seen for years. Getting down was the usual chaos of delayed trains, points failures and so on, but actually we were pretty lucky - a mere twenty minutes' delay from Glasgow, whereas the people coming from London were all delayed by several hours due to the horrendous traffic.
[Odd thing - in the pub on the first night, we noticed that out of eight of us, two already had doctorates, four were working towards them, one was planning to apply once she had her first degree, and the only one with no prospect of becoming a doctor had done published scientific research in an industrial context. Considering we met via theatre, I find this significant. And we found steerpikelet's ideal book lying about in the same pub.]
We awoke on the morning of the wedding to solid rain. Alanis Morrissette started up on permaloop in my head. After a massive (but rather too early) breakfast and some hanging about, we caught a hair-raising taxi to the church at about 1.30 - even by that stage, half the roads around the B&B were closed, and we had to take a circuitous route, occasionally going through puddles and crossing our fingers that the taxi would make it. We arrived about twenty minutes before the service was due to start, to be met by a grinning James at his most Wodehousian in a morning coat and fob watch. The rain was, if anything, getting harder: Rhi and I nipped over to the toilet in the village hall, and on the five-minute walk there got soaked to the skin. Fortunately (?), we had plenty of time to dry off - the bride didn't turn up on time. So we waited for her... and waited... and watched as the field outside the church filled up with water. When the bride eventually turned up (having had to commandeer a Land Rover instead of the low-slung Morgan she'd been planning on using, and at one point considering abandoning the Land Rover for a tractor when the water came over the bonnet) she was around an hour and a quarter late, though I don't think anyone minded!
The service was great. As well as readings from Isiah and the Song of Solomon, we also had a 4th century Latin grammarian and P.G. Wodehouse - no prizes for guessing who chose which. By what James assured me was a spectacular coincidence, all of the readings (and the sermon) featured water as a major theme.
Then ho to the village hall (with a lift in someone's car this time, thank goodness) for the reception. Champagne was poured, photos were taken, and then indoors for the meal (mmm, sausages...) and speeches - a decent effort from Penny's father, an excellent speech by James, and a rather stilted one from the best man. All this time, the rain had been continuing to beat down, and we were starting to worry if we'd be able to get home. After the meal broke up, Duncan and hobbitz and wormwood_pearl and I went for a walk to assess the extent of the flooding - deep puddles blocked the roads in every direction. By now it was clear that we were going to be spending the night in the hall. But we were warm and dry and had food and drink and good friends and party atmosphere, so frankly, who cared?
James was a tower of strength throughout - dashing about organising evacuation via tractors for the very young and the infirm. "Not quite how I'd planned on spending my wedding night", as he ruefully commented during a brief lull.
Listening to the radio, it became apparent just how lucky we were - though we ourselves were high and dry, Ledbury seemed to be at the centre of the flooding, and all around us people were trapped or flooded out - the people who were trapped in their cars overnight without food or water on the M5, for instance. We were buzzed a couple of times by Chinook helicopters looking for someone to rescue.
wormwood_pearl and I crashed out under a tablecloth at around 1am, and got up again at around 7 to help with the washing up and have some cake for breakfast. A worryingly underslept benparker had left in his car at about 6am as soon as the roads became briefly clear, and he returned at about 8 to fetch the remaining Light Entertainers. We tied a few cans to the 4x4 the wedding couple had borrowed for their escape, and headed back to the B&B, stopping off at Tescos to buy some food and the new Harry Potter book :-)
Best wedding ever, frankly.
Back at the B&B, we started to try to work out how we'd get home. There were no trains from Ledbury in the direction we wanted to go, and the traffic reports on the news were a self-contradictory litany of road closures, tailbacks and floods. Lacking the money to stay another night, we needed to get away, and fortunately benparker was going to Oxford and had space in his car. Oxford is, of course, where my family live, so after a quick call to check it was OK to stay with them, we set off. I probably wasn't very good company, because I had my nose buried in Harry Potter for most of the journey! We spent a few hours driving past flooded fields, and trying to decipher the traffic reports - Ben had lent his map to someone on the grounds that he had a sat-nav and didn't need it, and this made it hard to get any kind of overview. Except for the time when we were told that the road we were happily driving down was closed due to flooding. But it was a fairly uneventful journey, apart from leaving wormwood_pearl's bag at a coffee shop in the Cotswolds :-(
Oxford had been hit by the flooding too (no surprise there - it floods every winter anyway), but the bit where my parents live was basically fine (unlike whyoftheworld's ancestral manse, which had its ground floor flooded out). The trains north were down, though, so we were stuck at home for a couple of days. The horror, the horror :-) On Monday, the trains to Birmingham opened again, and the run-off from the hills meant that the waters around Oxford started to rise again, so we scarpered North hastily.
All in all, we were incredibly lucky. To quote lesslucid, "the best kind of natural disaster is the low-grade, not-very-disastery kind, where you get involved a little bit in the excitement of the possibility of natural forces spiralling out of control, but without having to cope with the consequences of natural forces actually spiralling out of control", and that's just what we had. Shout-outs and fingers crossed for all of you who caught it more severely, and especially whyoftheworld, mrkgnao and norm77, who (when last heard of) were flooded out, liable to be flooded out at any moment, and unflooded but without running water.