Chris finds out how the cats cope with a wild and wet winter
Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
A couple of months ago, we had some flooding around our area. I think the storm that caused it was called Babet, but in my case it would have been better named Bidet, considering that at one point I slipped and fell onto my backside in a foot of water. Hmmm – yes, definitely Storm Bidet.
After driving along flooded roads, getting soaked left, right and centre, taking half a dozen diversions around washed out streets, I arrived home to find I’d been sent the following email.
It’s important to conserve water in our area. Here is a list of the measures we all need to take.
1 Hosepipe Ban. Please read the section below entitled ‘What Exactly is a Hosepipe Ban?’.
Well, firstly, I was greatly relieved to know there’d be an explanation of that, because until that moment, I couldn’t for all the world figure out what a hosepipe ban might be.
Reading on, while occasionally glancing out of the window at my waterlogged garden, I was perplexed to discover that we were in conditions approaching drought.
Being the obedient citizen I am, I read the whole thing before opening a second email from the same authority. This one was offering me a free waterbutt, to be attached to my gutter, in an area-wide effort to combat all the flooding we’d been experiencing recently.
I definitely felt that I was being given mixed messages here, so was happy to see a third email, informing me that the first email had been accidentally re-sent out to some people, and in fact had related to weather conditions that occurred over a year ago.
So that was all clear then.
The good thing was, I was getting a free waterbutt – and what an ingenious contraption it turned out to be. It basically collected gutter-water, before feeding back slowly into the drainpipe, giving you loads of spare water and preventing drains being overwhelmed.
It is genuinely amazingly clever, and I’ve read since that the scheme has already prevented fl
