Under the weather...

A long silence again - simply because there was not much to say or share. I have been feeling under the weather still, and have cancelled my dancing holiday in Pitlochry - more's the pity, but I do not have the energy at the moment... Equally, I have not been doing much of anything else other than work, websites and trying to sell some crafts stuff on Ebay (my seller addy is "phcrafts" if anybody wants to have a look - or click here which will take you straight to my listings page).

But -- everything else has been under the weather, too. We have had some massive rainfalls here and the Bourne and the Abbey River (a sidearm of the river Thames) in Chertsey both flooded and caused substantial trouble, as did some other small streams in the area although not the Thames itself. None of those will ever trouble us here in this part of town as we are well away from all the rivers, however, the problem here (and in some other areas, too) is drains not coping with the amount of water. There were puddles in the main road just outside our house in both ways of driving, so deep that several times I did not dare drive through them (which is the only official way to get anywhere from our house!) and at some point deep enough for this section of the road to be closed for a few hours. The picture shows the puddle at the bottom of the bridge, which was the smaller of the two but this one I could take from our house! It got worse later but it was too dark then and the photos didn't turn out. There is now a roadworks not 500 yards down the road where they are trying to clear (or repair?) the drains, so hopefully we will not have those problems again.

Flood sign at the other side of the bridge.

Our side of the bridge - photo taken from our front garden.

That was a couple of weeks back - in the meantime, the waters have receded and we had some really nice sunny and warm days, and Emily and I spent some time together at the allotment. I think I mentioned before that as of this year I'm sharing her allotment which is at the end of a little road just a few hundred yards from here. Last Thursday I visited the council offices to get my "coworker's key", so it's official now! We've been doing a lot of clearing and ordering work - the soil is quite heavy with all the rain and the digging was hard work but it was good to be out and about in the first almost spring-like days, and nice to see the few things growing that were planted last year. Time to plan and order seeds - that should be fun!

The allotment - our plot goes from the shed to
where you can see Emily standing.

Emily standing by our patch of purple sprouting broccoli.