Late yesterday evening someone in the village WhatsApp group posted on a warning he’d received from the Environment Agency about possible overnight flooding. I looked at the current state of the weather and said I thought it was unlikely, but when the lane does flood the water’s just about at its deepest outside our front gate, and as we had to go to Warwick first thing this morning R decided it would be foolish to take the risk of our not being able to get off the drive, so he went out and moved his car to higher ground. This morning it turned out that I’d been right and the EA wrong – but far better that than the opposite.
Even though the rain wasn’t nearly as bad in the Midlands as the authorities had feared, it was still pretty bad, and we drove to Warwick through what felt like a monsoon. In fact, though the UK Met Office hasn’t officially classed (and named) this event as storm, the country was suffering the north edge of what the Spanish and Portuguese have named Storm Claudia – so it was windy, as well as wet, and driving conditions weren’t ideal. Neither were they great for standing outside in a car park, trying to get in through an automatic door that had taken umbrage at the swirling weather and stuck, as I found myself doing later in the morning for five very uncomfortable minutes.
Afterwards we didn’t even discuss the possibility of stopping off in Stratford for a walk, but hight-tailed it back home as fast as we safely could. I then squelched around the garden in search of a photo, and out of a handful of candidates I’ve chosen these pyracantha berries because they look far warmer and more cheerful than I actually was at any point in the day. “Pyracantha” derives from a couple of Greek words, and translates as “fire thorn” – which is entirely reasonable, given the colour of its berries and the spikiness of its stems.
R: L2, C1, D8.
