La Bloggerie

With the water level perilously close to flooding the two main gites, Les Baignades and La Sècherie, I got up at 4 o’clock to check what was happening.  Thankfully the water had got no higher than the previous evening, so I went back to bed fairly sure that damage would be minimal.

At 8 o’clock I couldn’t believe the difference.  Where four hours previously there had been a torrent of water crossing the front of the house through to a garden that was totally submerged, now there was barely a trickle and grass was again visible.  The level had miraculously dropped by at least 12 inches in that time, and the gites had survived unscathed.

Being so preoccupied with our own troubles on Saturday we had failed to notice news reports of the ‘tempête’ of the night before.  Yes we had had some very strong winds and plenty of rain, but it does now seem as though we were extremely lucky and caught only the edge of the passing storm.

The French speak of the storms of 1999 as being a once-in-every-100-years experience, but in places like Bordeaux they are having to update their figures.   You can have too many once in a lifetime experiences.

In the space of a few hours on Saturday evening the level of the water rose to an altogether new high and another sleepless night looked likely.

We had spent most of the day digging channels in the car park to take the water that was by now pouring out of the stream by the house.  Sandbags were filled and used in an effort to stop the water running into the front of La Sècherie and a hole cut in the wall to allow as much of it as possible to pass through into the side garden.

However, as night fell the stream to the side of La Sècherie had flooded up to the level of the wall around the front of the gite.  All the lawns were completely submerged and our front garden just blended in to the stream and across to the sports hall.  The concrete storm drain that runs away from the old mill was a swirling mass of water, probably over a metre deep.

 There seemed little more we could do.  There was nowhere left that we could pump water to, so we just sandbagged the doors of the two gites and let nature do its thing.

Some photos taken this morning …
   

… and some from this afternoon.

High drama yesterday evening as the streams around La Tannerie broke their banks at a couple of points.  Heavy rain the night before had meant that the water level had been rising all day.  But suddenly, at about midnight we discovered that water was running across the front of the house.  The bridge under the drive just couldn’t cope with the volume of water.

Unfortunately the seating area in front of La Sècherie rapidly filled to a depth of about 8 inches, and with water lapping at the doors of the gite we decided we couldn’t leave it until the morning.  We filled bags with sand to put in the doorways, scraped ths gravel to make channels to divert the flood into the front garden and set a pump running to reduce the level.

By 3 o’clock we felt fairly confident that we had done enough to stop the water getting into La Sècherie and, soaked to the skin, we headed for bed.

If there is one topic of conversation that has dominated amongst the Brits living out here in recent weeks it is the dramatic fall in the value of the pound.

Everyone is using the word ‘parity’ with total disgust.  The ex-pats that have been hit hardest are those that rely on money coming from the UK - pensioners mostly – but there are many who now rent out their property in England to help make ends meet here who find that ends are in fact getting further apart.

It has also had an effect on our business.  Leaving our prices in sterling in 2008 reduced our income by 30%.  And all this at a time when fuel prices have reached an all-time high.

The only option open to us has been to quote all our rates in Euros, but mindful of the general downturn, we have pitched our prices lower than they were in 2005.

Early indications are that out bookings for 2009 will be every bit as good as last year.  Maybe there will be families who would normally have travelled much further afield who will decide that the Charente is the place to go.  After all, you can drive there from the UK in a day, the weather is more reliable, and now the prices are lower than they were 4 years ago!

Another bitterly cold night, but bright sunshine meant that working outdoors was quite pleasant if you kept moving.

Eventually tracked down the frozen pipe that had left us without water since yesterday morning.  It was a section of pipe that fed an outside tap that was just too close to the surface to be safe.  A quick blast from the hairdryer and all was well.

It’s not until you are without it that you realise just how much water you use in the normal course of events, or for that matter just how little you need to survive.  But that was little consolation as, with ironic timing, we put a whacking great cheque in the post to the local water company for last year’s supply.

A telephone call this morning soon after 7.00 from the couple staying in Les Baignades (the gite to the rear of the property) to let me know they had no water. 

It’s at moments like this that you wish you had been about when the plumbers, electricians and builders were renovating La Tannerie some 12 years ago, because you would at least have some idea as to where the water main comes into the house.

I headed for the site of a previous flood at La Tannerie.  This had happened on the very day that our surveyor had arrived to give the place a thorough going-over shortly before we bought it.  In fact, to the embarrassment of the then owners, it was the surveyor who had found water pouring down the walls of La Secherie.

Surveyors, like estate agents, have their own language when it comes to describing property.  The rather cryptic reference to the plumbing possibly needing some attention wasn’t quite how I would have described it, and floods didn’t even get a mention.

So I spent the majority of the day crawling around the loft space above the gites with a hairdryer, hoping that I would find the point at which the minus 12 degree temperatures of the night before had frozen up our supply.

By late afternoon we were still no further forward, and it began to dawn on me that the problem might not be indoors at all.  As the temperature plumetted again I called our plumber to see if he could help.  But by bedtime he still hadn’t appeared.

It had looked as though we had had all the snow we were going to get by bedtime last night, but overnight a heavy downfall meant that this morning we had a good four inches of snow. 

We have had snow once before in four years, but this is a huge amount by comparison, and unlike last time it doesn’t look like it is going to clear very soon.

I never really understood the ‘it’s too cold for snow’ argument. But today has been warmer (it actually got up to 0 degrees)  and suddenly it’s snowing.

Graham, on his way to the Australian summer, rang us to say that there was snow all the way from Poitiers up to Paris, and sure enough it reached here late in the evening.

There’s something about fresh snow that brings out the child in me and I found an excuse to wander round to the post office late on just so that I could be the first one to leave footprints.

The dogs made me look quite sensible though as they experienced their first snow, rushing about, rolling around and generally getting very excited. I’m sure they would rather be here than lying in 38 degree heat on a Queensland beach.

Our fascination with the weather isn’t just the usual British obsession. It’s just that if the weather in the UK is ever better than the weather out here we feel cheated.

Over the holiday period we have had some beautifully sunny days, but unfortunately we pay for those clear skies with temperatures that drop sharply once the sun goes down.

And last night was the coldest for a very long time. The temperature fell to minus 6 degrees over night, and unusually the frost didn’t clear during the day in those parts of the garden that don’t get any sunshine at this time of the year.

The top of the swimming pool was covered in ice, and more worryingly the pipework to the pump house was frozen solid. All of the gites are occupied this week, which will probably help to prevent burst pipes indoors, but if this is global warming it’s not working very well.

The lowest temperature we have ever recorded was during our first February four years ago when one night it hit minus 15 degrees. Could we be in for a new all-time low?