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Wednesday, January 02, 2013

If there's one thing I've learnt from my ten years of blogging (and I think there is only the one thing) it's that you don't always end up writing the blog post you planned to. This evening I'd intended to publish this photo of Toby wearing a plastic headband and a penguin sticker...


... and then write an essay about Amelie's role as the natural successor to Gok Wan.

But all that's changed in the past couple of hours. Today was my first day back at work after the Christmas break, and frankly my life's been a beach. Unfortunately the beach has been this one...


Not content with spending half the morning in the Diabetes Centre, I spent the whole afternoon in a jam-packed Sussex Eye Hospital, where I gave new meaning to the phrase 'intraocular pressure', and saw more patients than Jimmy Savile in the seventies.

So having collected Amelie from nursery, I returned home this evening, planning to do nothing more than vegetate on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate.

Unfortunately we needed all the spare mugs, saucepans and buckets we could lay our hands on shortly after 6pm when water started flooding through the ceiling in both bedrooms and the living room. Which I thought was bad until it began spouting horizontally out of the wall near a light switch.

To cut a long and very wet story short, the lady in the flat above started her washing machine going at teatime today, then promptly went out for the evening while it merrily exploded above us, and started pumping out water across her kitchen floor. With nowhere to go, and no carpets to absorb it (she lives for her laminate flooring), the water had no choice but to go down, finding its way into the electrical alcoves in the concrete ceiling, and then straight into our flat.

Within minutes we had power-showers in three rooms, my old video collection was ruined, Amelie's toy box was three inches deep in brown water, and I was running around with bowls, buckets and vases. In the three hours since, we've got to know a bloke from the council, an emergency plumber and a qualified electrician, all of whom (to be fair) have been great. We'll get to meet a surveyor soon too.

In the meantime, the ceiling's still dripping, so are my socks, and I've filled two black sacks with water-damaged property. And that doesn't include Amelie who was so traumatised by it all that she went as white as a sheet, burst into tears, and insisted on going to bed with no story. Which is about as upset as she gets.

But still, you have to laugh. And the funny thing is, I thought we had a damp problem before this. That'll teach me to complain.

6 comments:

Phil's Mum said...

If you were superstitious...................you might blame the year 2013!  As this is only the 2nd day, I hope it can't continue like this.

Phil said...

For a moment I thought it was the Mayan apocalypse coming three weeks late. But as things stand right now, I've just taken a third sack of water-logged belongings down to the rubbish area (mostly ruined toys), and I think we're finally sorted. We'll probably have a fire now.

Phil's Mum said...

I don't think a fire would have much chance of taking hold - just one small silver lining to the cloud!

Peter Chapman said...

I hope you've taken pictures of all the damaged items, you must be able to make some sort of a claim.

Phil said...

That's very true. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the water managed to target items with a low monetary value. I'm not sure I'll get much compensation for a load of VHS videos, twenty-year-old paperbacks, and cheap toys from charity shops.

Jon the Insurance Scammer said...

Tell them your truffles are water damaged!