Jammy dodger!

There’s a storm brewing. The radio is playing the Static Waltz, the sky has come over that horrible oppressive purply grey, the air is thick, and there’s a rumblin’ in the distance (and that’s not because it’s nearly dinner time: odds and sods pie tonight) .

We are the jam in the doughnut, as bad weather like this usually goes round us. However, when it hits, it hits hard as we can lose mains power, and things can get sticky.  We’ve already replaced the majority of our fence.

A few years ago, we’d had weeks of hot muggy days, and when the weather finally broke in a spectacular storm, we were out walking the dog and so relieved that we started dancing in the rain, enjoying the chance to cool off.

It bucketed down, and I mean complete with handles. By the time we had laughingly sloshed back to the car and got home, our drive was under about two inches of water.
It was then that we discovered our soak-aways didn’t.
The storm didn’t last that long, but it was enough to make us twitchy as the water took some time to recede, and the following day we investigated why our drainage wasn’t draining.
One down pipe from the roof guttering disappeared into a hole in the ground although actually it wasn’t. The pipe stopped on a couple of bricks wrapped in a plastic bag, thus the water had nowhere to go.
At the other end of the property, the down pipe went into the soil, and that was it.
We therefore invested £138 in a 50 meter coil of drainage pipe (flexible pipe but with little holes all round it, the same as the farmers use in their fields) , and dug a ‘french drain’ across the entire front of the house, down the side, along part of the garage and out into the trees.
It was a game as Hubby was having one of his bad spells, so he sat on the ground with his hinged spade to dig and fill the wheelbarrow, which I then trundled to the back of the garden to empty.  We’d also purchased 2 gutter bends, and directed the two down pipes into the drainage pipe just below ground level.
The water now goes along the gutter, into the down pipe and then into the buried drainage pipe and flows away from the house into the back garden where the grass is flourishing, thank you very much.

Shortly after, we had another freak storm hit us. The drive started to pool, the water was gushing as water does, and it all worked marvellously.

Hubby has just checked the weather radar and we have been side-swiped by a band of bad weather sweeping across the centre of the country. The radio has settled down, the rumbling has gone, and dinner is in the oven.
As I said, odds and sods pie. I found pastry at the back of the freezer, had one small chicken breast and some mixed veg left, so I added an onion and stock cube, lined one of my cake tins with pastry (my pie dishes are probably joining in the orgy with my mixing bowl) and if the smell is anything to go by, it should be a pretty delish dish.
And it was!

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