Saturday, January 14, 2012

All out of kelter

The ducks were in the stream right opposite our front gate on Friday morning – a whole group, both males & females. No ducklings, though it won’t be a surprise if they put in an appearance soon – everything is so topsy turvey with the weather.

The whole of the Christmas holiday period was marred by high wind & rain, made even worse in our case by continuing power cuts, of which we were getting sometimes two a day until, on the first Friday of the New Year, a lot of men & vans turned up & started to dig a hole in the road in the lane just this side of the bridge.

Although they have not yet completed the job, the temporary fix has at least meant no more interruptions to service. And with so much practice I have at last learned to reset the bedside radio without recourse to the sheet of instructions.

It may just have been ordinary wear & tear to something but I suspect that water must have been getting in to the underground cables. And that is probably a consequence of the strange weather too, since it meant that the usual timetable for sweeping up the leaves to keep them out of the drains finished well before they finally fell from the trees last year.