Today being Sunday I went to visit my mum in the morning and in the afternoon I went to see my mother in law who has just come out of hospital. At about 4pm it was time to return home and it started raining. As I drove the short journey home the rain was getting worse and I started to encounter flooding. The nearer I got to Bisley the deeper the floods were. I just about made it home and was worried about my driveway. I already knew that after heavy rain that the surface water washed down my sloping drive and if it did not drain fast enough it would go into the garages.
I quickly parked the car and dashed indoors and got my welly boots and an umbrella. I emerged outside and set up a syphon using a hosepipe. The water was almost at the level where it would flood the garage. The rain just got harder. I grabbed a large broom and tried to sweep the torrent in the roadway into the drain. I was loosing the battle and the rain kept intensifying. I was thinking, if only I had got back a bit earlier, if only Mrs Peewit wasn’t lying on a beach in Barbados and could give me a hand. Just as the flood was getting worse and I was getting soaked whilst wielding my broom, a car pulled into the road and parked nearby. The occupant got out of his car and walked over to a bedraggled Peewit and whilst he was standing their holding a bottle of wine in one hand he had the gall to ask me where number 5 was. So much for helping the needy.
My garages were now 2 inches deep in water and I decided to start bailing out water in the driveway by filling a large 2.5 gallon bucket from a smaller one used as a scoop. I was still struggling to do all this whilst holding the umbrella. I took each large full bucket into a low point in the back garden and poured it out. I must have done this over a hundred times over the next hour and at one point the water was no longer gushing into the garages. However the weather decided it was not going to be beaten and just rained even harder. I had lost the battle and after an hour and a half of unequal struggle I gave up. The garage was already flooded and there was nothing I could do to improve the situation. I went into the house, removed all my soaking wet clothing and had a hot shower. Having put clean, dry clothing on the rain eased off. Eventually my syphon drained off the flood around the garage. After another half an hour the rain started again and as soon as the flood started to build up I went and got the syphon working again. This seemed to be the trigger for an even more torrential downpour. I was annoyed having just seen a weather forecaster on the tv talking about the showers dying out. This definitely not a shower and it was not dying out. This time the flood was even worse and a level of about 4 inches above the garage floor was achieved. Because the garage floor slopes slightly, once the water has gone in it does not come out again but just remains as an enormous puddle. My job for tomorrow will be to sort the mess out.
I had been complaining about my garden being too dry but now my garage interior is too wet. I bet the hosepipe ban is still in place in the morning.
A weary Peewit
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