EARTH, WIND and RAIN. Luckily no fire
Dear Long-Suffering Friends, I write to you from a house that is — technically — still standing, though Saint Medard, the Patron Saint of Absolutely Filthy Weather, gave it his very best shot. One hundred and eighty millimetres of rain in 24 hours. Not content with merely drowning us, the old saint sent one final triumphant gust to flatten our largest beech tree, then — with the cunning of a medieval siege engineer — found a hole in the wall the width of a gnat's whisker and delivered a puddle to our sitting room. The ducks, I should report, were delighted. They had, however, not been invited. The solution, naturally, was to go outside in the biblical deluge and dig trenches. The water that burst forth nearly carried me bodily down the hillside — a scene reminiscent of the opening of the Kariba Dam, though considerably less planned. Three tons of gravel later (shovelled by hand, into a wheelbarrow, uphill, because of course they dumped it at the bottom), my biceps ha...