Floodblog ... Days 5, 6 & 7

Cheltenham washing-up

No I haven't succumbed to typhoid, I've been too busy and/or too tired to blog for a few days. We spent the weekend in Burton-on-Trent, which was a very welcome relief from our waterless regime. I mentioned the other day that I was being interviewed on an internet radio station to promote my album ... well, the show's presenter very kindly offered to let Ian and I stay at his house overnight so that we could have a shower and refill our water bottles. We were down to our last litre of stored tapwater so it was very timely and we're very grateful to Paul and Lynn for their kindness in looking after us.

Back in Cheltenham though, there's no change in the situation for us yet. We're managing all right with the drinking water, and with a plentiful supply of rainwater to flush the lav. I'm very grateful to my friends Erin and Bryony who showed up on the doorstep this afternoon with a 5-litre bottle of spring water, having been through their own traumas and dramas with the flooding, and now taking the trouble to help us out. We really appreciate it.

The things which are really difficult are laundry and (worst of all) washing-up. Some parts of the town have now had their water switched back on, but it's basically just sludge that's coming out of the taps ... suitable for toilet flushing only. You can't drink it or wash dishes in it, not even if you boil it first. It's possibly OK to do laundry with it, but only at a 60° wash. And ours isn't back on yet anyway, so it looks like I'll be taking a few more outdoor showers before this is over. That's OK though ... my hair was really soft and fluffy after that dousing, much better than washing it in tap water. Don't believe any of the bollocks they say in shampoo ads about the beneficial effects of some made-up chemical or non-existent botanical extract: if you want lovely soft shiny hair just stick yer head out the window. Because you're worth it.



Radio Gloucestershire were trying very hard to get the message out to people that if their water comes back on they mustn't drink it under any circumstances. Sanitation only. But people were ringing in with the most extraordinary questions. Is it OK to make ice cubes with it? Can I use it to wash my dishes if I squirt a bit of bleach in with it? Aaargh!

And talking of radio, if anyone wants to listen to my interview there's a repeat of it on Wednesday 1st August from 7-10pm (BST) on Rock247Online. I'm on during the first hour and then again in the third hour, along with seven of my songs! That's quite a coup for a musician of my (*ahem*) modest status. I finally have a release date for the album too ... 7th August. Woohoo!

And I'm also interviewed on a music podcast which came out today, available to listen to or download any time.

Floodblog ... Day 4: a Cheltenham photo gallery

All pictures taken in Cheltenham town centre this afternoon.

This is Cheltenham High Street today, looking pretty much as it does on any Friday afternoon. It's hard to imagine that most of the people in this photo have had no running water for four days.

And if you've seen the tabloid newspaper headlines and were afraid we might all be dying of cholera, as you can see, we're not. Seven days after the flood, which was the second "100 year flood" in three weeks, Cheltenham looked like its normal self. It was only the presence of lots of fire engines, army trucks and water tankers on the roads that showed things were not normal. Most shops were open, especially the small ones run by local people, though some of the big chains were closed presumably in decisions taken by absentee managers who don't know what it's actually like here. The cinema was closed but the music concerts at the pump room went ahead. The local buses were running. And the general mood on the streets is still chirpy. People were sitting at outdoor tables at cafés. The lion's head fountain was on in Sandford Park (presumably running on river water) and people were sunning themselves on the lawns. There was a shop selling large buckets.

I wouldn't want to underplay the seriousness of the situation ... this is a place where people's homes and livelihoods have been wrecked, twice in some cases, and many people are going through one misery after another as they start to sort out the mess. But you won't see that many people feeling sorry for themselves. There's a contingent of whingers of course, but most people are taking responsibility for themselves and getting on with it.

St George's Street in the town centre. Residents desperate for water have tilted this bowser up on a police traffic cone to get the last few dregs out of it.

The Prontaprint shop on the Bath Road has bags of builder's sand piled up its doorway. Their shop has been flooded twice in the last three weeks. Last Friday when the floods were doing their worst there was a queue of 60 cars waiting for sandbags at the council's depot, so many had to resort to buying their own sand from builders' merchants.

A familiar sight in Cheltenham at the moment as businesses struggle to stay open ... Portaloos for staff lined up outside an office building. They are all padlocked so that the general public can't nip in and use them!

So far the council has not been able to get hold of any Portaloos for public use because there's a drastic shortage, but they're working on it. The town's economy is heavily reliant on tourism so we need our public bogs! And the police have threatened to arrest anyone who widdles in the street.

Vandalism is a part of British life these days even in a crisis. This bowser in Rodney Road has been "tagged".

Sign addressed to Severn Trent, our regional water company, taped to the bowser in Rodney Road.

I think whoever put this here is being a bit harsh. Yes there is a shortage of water and it's frustrating (north Gloucestershire is running on 5% of its usual water consumption) but I honestly don't think Severn Trent could have done much more to prepare for the current unprecedented situation, and for the most part they have done a fantastic job in trying to deal with it. Of course there are many things they could have done better but flippin' heck, look at the scale of what they're faced with.

The River Chelt just round the back of Royal Well Lane, still a bit lively and murky but behaving itself. It's what's known as a "flashy" river ... it isn't very big or deep but it's prone to swelling up very, very suddenly, taking surges of rainwater off the Cotswold hills from other nearby brooks. There's still some debris here left over from the flooding. That panel you can see appears to be a kitchen cupboard door.

These houses in Little Bayshill Terrace have the River Chelt running right round them and against their perimeter walls, so it's no wonder they still have a few sandbags piled up on the wall. You can't really see it in this pic, but there is a Siamese cat sitting in the top left window.

Floodblog ... Day 3

I've posted some odd pictures on my blog, but this is a first. This is me taking an 'al fresco' shower on the patio this afternoon during a torrential downpour.

OK, it may look like a daft thing to do ... but after three days with no water and only being able to "wash" myself with a packet of cosmetic facial wipes (the only thing Tesco's had left), just standing there with all that water tipping out of the sky all over me was the most exhilarating experience I've had in years.

And why not? It's wet. It's clean-ish. Why waste it? I actually feel clean now for the first time since the weekend. It's wonderful.

The only trouble was, when I came back in the house to change back into my dry clothes I found somebody else had got there first.


Frivolity aside, the heavy rain was the last thing we needed right now. It won't have helped the emergency services in their efforts to pump out the Mythe water works, nor will it have done any favours for the swollen rivers, nor the morale of people who are wading through their living rooms.

So, it's Day 3 and we're managing fine ... in fact life is getting more comfortable as we settle into a routine with the water management. The first night I couldn't sleep because I was fretting about how we were going to cope for a whole fortnight with no water. But now I have a better awareness of how much water we need and how much we have stored and how often we need to replenish it, I'm not worried at all. We don't currently have enough to last us through, but we're not thinking that far ahead ... we've suddenly developed a mentality where as long as we're OK from one day to the next we don't worry about the longer term. And actually that new mindset really lifts my spirits and makes life in general seem less of a burden. I assume it's the same for others too because there's quite a mood of chirpiness in Cheltenham at the moment, despite the fears expressed in news reports that we may soon all be keeling over from stress.

There is light in the tunnel for Ian and me anyway. I'm booked to do a radio interview in Tamworth on Sunday to promote my forthcoming album so we'll be able to take all our empty water bottles up there for refilling.

I've been following a partially self-sufficient lifestyle for years out of nothing more than a kind of hippyish idealism, but right now I'm reaping huge dividends from it. While fresh food is in short supply in the shops we can make more use of garden fruit and vegetables and leave the stuff in Tesco's for those who need it more. We have plenty of collected rainwater which is clean enough for some basic washing and cleaning needs, which minimises the amount of stored tap water we have to use. We're not totally self-sufficient in the current crisis, but near enough. There's just the two of us in the house, we're healthy and able-bodied and we don't have kids, so it's been easy for us to adapt and fend for ourselves. And we have a car, so if it became intolerable we could just leave. Not everyone here is having such an easy time of it. Radio Gloucestershire put out an appeal today on behalf of a woman desperate to borrow someone's washing machine because she looks after "a number of incontinent people".

The army are still giving out thousands of bottles of water in supermarket car parks but we haven't needed that so far because we still have a few bottles of water we bought from Tesco's before the crisis. We've also avoided taking any more water from the bowser in the street while we still have some stocks of tap water, as there is a desperate shortage. And it IS true what they're saying on the news about the failure to refill them ... Severn Trent Water have said they're refilling them five times a day, but that is simply not happening. I hope things will improve now that they've admitted they're struggling and drafted the army in to help.

Bureaucracy continues to be one of the biggest obstacles round here. First they delayed the deployment of the bowsers because of health and safety regulations. Today it emerged that Gloucester City Council were sticking doggedly to their normal policy of refusing to collect any domestic rubbish bags which are not placed inside the regulation wheelie bins. Trouble is, the enterprising (and desperate) people of Gloucester have been rigging up plastic sheeting and whatever else they can find to collect rainwater and funnel it into their wheelie bins so that they can flush their toilets. For many of them their wheelie bin is the only large receptacle they have available for collecting and storing rainwater. It's really quite scary that the regulations designed to protect public health are so rigidly applied they become a threat to public health in their own right.

Out on the streets of Cheltenham at 11 o'clock this evening it was almost deserted, and the few cars out and about didn't seem to be in any hurry, not even the taxis. There were a couple of late-night dogwalkers, and a pickup truck parked on the main road where a bloke was delivering water bottles to a couple of elderly ladies at the roadside.

Floodblog ... Day 2

On the menu tonight ... damsons from our very own trees

When I worked in publishing I used to read The Bookseller, a trade magazine for publishers, bookshops and librarians, and one of its most entertaining features was the annual Oddest Title of the Year award. This year the prize went to The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America, which pipped the favourite, How Green Were The Nazis? However, my favourite of the past winners was this gem back in the 80s: How to Shit in the Woods, an Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art. I've never seen the book, but if somebody set up a stall in Gloucestershire selling copies of it now, I think they would move like something off a shovel.

Similarly the webmasters of Composting Toilet World and How To Make and Use a Simple "Sawdust" Toilet must be getting a surge of hits from the north Cotswold area at the moment.

It's not something I've ever had to think about in all my 38 years, but one thing I have learned in the past couple of days is that however magnificent a contraption the common water closet may be, when it doesn't have a supply of water it's not only useless, it's potentially a liability.

Yesterday there was a desperate shortage of drinking water. Today it's bog water. Unfortunately a lot of people in the area are having to use emergency supplies of drinking water to fill up their toilet cisterns, which has led to even more desperate shortages. Many people (and I think it's probably worse up the road in Gloucester than it is here) are wandering around for hours trying to find a bowser that isn't empty. The bowsers are clearly marked with the instruction that their contents are to be used for drinking water only, and when you see how small they are and what a large population is dependent on each of them that makes sense ... but people still need to flush their toilets. Gardeners with brimming rainwater butts are living in relative luxury, and have the additional option to wee in the compost to minimise toilet use. If you live in a town centre flat or a house with only a small courtyard garden (as tens of thousands here do) ... what the hell do you do?

But for the moment our hearts go out to the people of Oxford, Abingdon and other places along the Thames whose flood nightmare is just beginning. I saw an Oxford allotment site completely under water on the BBC news today and really felt for the gardeners who had tended those plots, though in the great scheme of things it seems petty to grieve over lost vegetables.

And as difficult as it is for us, we are doing all right. The water has been off for 48 hours but we still have drinking water, fresh food, clean clothes and hot meals. Not to mention a dry house, which makes me feel guilty when I see pictures of the inundation people are dealing with just a few miles away. The garden is providing us with supplementary fresh food, even if we can't live entirely off it. Right now I'm tucking into a fantastic damson trifle which Ian made today ... we have a temporary shortage of raspberries but damsons are in great supply and can be stewed with only the teeniest splosh of water. We even managed to do a small batch of washing up today, so it will be a delight to have clean cups for tomorrow morning's cup of tea.

And despite the garden looking rather sorry for itself on the whole, I'm still getting nice surprises. Although previously ravaged by slugs and pelted flat by the rain, this new pea flower just appeared as if out of nowhere.



It's a variety called Taiwan Sugar which Patrick gave me, and although he told me it had pink flowers I wasn't execting them to be quite like this. I assumed they'd be the same two tone pink as the purple podded varieties. So I was rather delighted by their unusual candy pink colour, a nice little burst of cheerfulness on a grey day. Thanks Patrick!

Floodblog ... Day 1

This bowser is our sole water supply ... my husband Ian filling up bottles there this morning

Well, I'm still here ... and for that I'm exceedingly grateful to the Fire & Rescue services and army and navy units who worked through the night knee-deep in floodwater to save our power supply. Last night we were afraid we would lose it as the Walham power station was only two inches from total inundation, but they managed to rescue it. It is pretty stupid that most of the population of north Gloucestershire is reliant on a single substation, and for that matter a single water works, but there you go.

All credit to those involved in the relief effort though. Within hours of our tap water running dry there was a bowser tank installed on the corner of the street, about 200 yards away from us. It's not ideal, and we still have nothing to wash in because this water is for drinking only, but when you consider the scale of the problem (and it probably is difficult to imagine the scale of it unless you're here) there is a sense that the emergency services are doing everything they can to help as many people as possible, and we're just sitting it out.

The weather was lovely here today, which made the crisis seem a bit unreal, and there were people out mowing their lawns. There has been a near constant wail of emergency vehicle sirens though since Friday when the first floods came. Not much activity in the street, except for people walking up and down with water bottles to collect supplies. Round here at least, people were just collecting as much as they could carry on foot, no more than a couple of 2-litre bottles. I didn't see any selfish gits filling the boots of their cars with huge containers. But even so, some of the bowsers in our neigbourhood had run dry by the end of the day. They are not all that big, and there's such a large population here with no water. Well, about 100,000 in Cheltenham alone, though we spoke to a couple of friends today on the east side of town who haven't been cut off yet.

It's a bit strange getting used to the absence of water. We have a few bottles of tap water we collected yesterday while we still had it, and we're using that for cups of tea and teeth-cleaning. Drinking water is not a problem yet as we have a few bottles of mineral water and other drinks stashed away. But we can't really do any washing up, so tea is made with fresh water in unwashed cups. And we can only wash our hands by dipping them in an ice-cream tub of not-terribly-clean water. No chance of laundry, nor of more than a cursory wash.

My main job for today was to decant rain water from all the flower pots I could find in the garden into a watering can, which was then transferred into a bucket for flushing the toilet. I then spread out the empty pots and containers on the patio table to catch as much as possible of the forecast deluge tomorrow. We need as much rainwater as we can collect. The toilet is the main issue, and we found the hard way that it takes a lot of water to flush it. We only have what's in the rainwater butt, and can't afford to waste it. So it's not possible to flush the toilet more than once or twice a day at most. I've taken the precaution of digging a makeshift earth closet in the garden which may work better, although we haven't resorted to it yet. A pee bucket has also been pressed into service.

This evening for dinner we had a baked beetroot from the garden (ideal because you don't have to wash it, just cook it in foil and peel the skin off before serving) and some boiled potatoes, which were a luxury because I had to use some water to cook them (a minimal amount though, if you cut them up small). Dinner was a tiny bit gritty with earth from the unwashed root vegetables, but that's OK. I tried to reuse the hot potato water to wash up my tea cup, which turned out to be a bad move. Still, that's one advantage of having to harvest all my potatoes early to escape the blight ... I have a very welcome cupboard full of them. The garden is suddenly turning out to be a godsend, providing us with fresh food and rainwater. We're very lucky, because so many people here live in flats. I've no idea how they're coping.

We ventured out to Tesco's at half past nine this evening (it's a 24-hour one) to see what we could find in the way of provisions. We didn't expect to find much, to be honest. We walked there, partly because I wanted to exercise my bad foot (now healing well). The streets were very quiet.

No bread in Cheltenham ... this is the bakery aisle of our big Tesco's superstore this evening.

It was fairly predictable what they'd run out of. Bread. Sandwiches. Disposable plates. Baby wipes. Anti-bacterial surface wipes. Buckets and bowls. In the kiddies' holiday toys section buckets were sold out while spades stayed resolutely on the shelf. Other than that it looked pretty much like a normal stock of stuff. Scented candles and exotically fragranced bath oil seemed strangely out of place, beautifully bright and colourful on the shelf but about as useful in the current situation as a chocolate teapot. It's quite weird knowing that everyone else in the shop, and in the whole town, is in the same situation. Nobody is buying bath products, because nobody has a working bath. I could hear people laughing and joking about having to resort to medieval-style toilet facilities. But of course they're not joking, and the humour comes from the shared experience.

There weren't many people in there panic-buying. The man behind us in the checkout queue was buying a single box of Frosties. Luxury and cosmetic goods didn't seem to be selling very well, so no shortages there. But I was impressed to see they did still have about a dozen (rationed) bottles of organic milk. We left that though, because we still have some milk in the freezer and others will need it far more than we do. I did selfishly grab the penultimate bottle of disinfectant though. And we found some plastic cups. Remarkably, they were stocking themselves up with a mountainous stash of bottled water, which is a good sign because it's been very hard to get so far. Earlier in the day the army were dishing out rationed water bottles in the car park outside (six litres each) and yesterday in the supermarkets people were so desperate they were nicking it out of each other's trolleys.

There was no spirit of meanness in there tonight though. In fact it felt very relaxed, and not at all like the frantic cattle market it is on a normal day. Everywhere you looked people were smiling. Nobody was in any rush, or showing any stress, just sauntering around seeing what was available. It was so much nicer than it usually is! People can be so selfish and horrible when preparing for an imminent crisis but as soon as the crisis becomes a reality they all start talking nicely to each other and smiling. In some strange ways Cheltenham is a nice place to be at the moment.

Some people are not very bothered

And it gets worse ...

Ahem ... well we seem to have something of a national emergency going on around here. There's no floods to worry about in our part of town but the devastation in neighbouring areas is terrible. Our water supply has stopped and we're likely to be without it for quite a while (peeing in the compost and washing in the rainwater butt, I guess). Power and internet access are still on for the moment, so we're very fortunate. There are people only a few miles away who are being evacuated because their homes have been wrecked.

If you've seen pictures on the UK national news of the army trying to build an emergency dam around an electricity substation ... well, that's ours. If that goes I'll be going quiet for a bit.

Blimey, what a week

The weather here has gone really silly over the past week and our town has been flooded. We only have a tiny river running through Cheltenham but it's fed by streams coming down off the Cotswolds and after heavy rain it can swell to flood levels within a couple of hours. Not helped by the fact that it mostly runs through narrow hidden culverts underneath the streets. And being a spa town, with underground streams and springs all over the place already, there's not really anywhere for the surplus water to go.

I'm rather disturbed to hear that the 200-year-old Playhouse Theatre (which I know and love intimately because I used to work in it) has been inundated. They've had to cancel two shows, and have lost loads of precious irreplaceable costumes. I really feel for them, because the place is run almost entirely by volunteers and they put so much love and hard work into it. Before the building was a theatre it was a swimming pool ... the stage is built over the deep end and the auditorium seating rakes up towards the shallow end. The deep part of the pool under the stage is used as a props and furniture store and I always used to love going down there because it still has its full compliment of colourful Art Nouveau ceramic tiles ... a beautifully preserved 1890s swimming bath completely hidden from public view below a hidden trapdoor. Well now the pool once again has water in it. There's a lot more of the building even below that; it was originally built in 1807 as a laboratory for extracting the salts from mineral waters (to be flogged off in little jars at an inflated price for medicinal purposes) and there was an elaborate system of underground channels in place to pipe the healing waters directly from various spas in the vicinity. This network of channels apparently still exists and runs for some considerable distance under the town. I'm not sure what happens if they get filled up with floodwater. I wouldn't want to be living on top of one of the old closed-up spas.

We're lucky that we live far enough away from the river that it didn't directly affect us when it burst its banks on Friday. But we had some flooding from the incredibly heavy rain, hopefully nothing too serious. It leaked through the roof into a not-much-used pantry area at the back of the house ... it soaked the walls and the carpet but it was only a manky old bit of carpet anyway and we don't keep anything too precious out there. The extent of the damage is hard to assess at the moment because it's quite dark in there and we dare not put the light on with water leaking through the ceiling.

But at any rate I was not in a position to do much about the roof leak on Friday other than stick a plastic tub under the worst of the drips and hope for the best ... and that's because the previous day (when it was actually hot and sunny) I fell over in the garden and twisted my foot, just by stepping awkwardly on the edge of the garden path. It swelled up quite badly and left me unable to walk. It's on the mend now and I can walk about, but I'm still feeling rather sore and I have a bruise on my foot which closely matches the colour of my purple pea pods.

Now we're being told that we may lose our water and power supplies over the next few days as emergency repairs are carried out. Our local water treatment works was evacuated in the early hours of this morning because of severe flooding, and they're talking about imminent water shortages while they sort out the damage.

Today I went outside and looked at the garden for the first time since the deluge and the soil looks like a river bed! The water's drained off OK but there are swirls of sand and silty deposits through the vegetable plots and some of the plants are covered in mud. No significant damage but it adds to the overall messiness of the garden this year. Harrumph.