Now that's what I call rain

What a downpour last night! I can only imagine what monsoon rain is like but this must have been pretty close. The storm kept us both awake for large parts of the night. Even Max, who rarely shows that he is disturbed by thunder and lightening, started to make his discomfort felt. We had already battened down the hatches the day before, so we did not expect to find too many problems, but the first thing that I noticed was that the pool had filled right to the top. I conservatively estimate that the pool took on 4 cubic metres of water and was getting close to overflowing. My first job was to check to see if the land drainage that we put in at the beginning of the year was working, and it was. Water was flowing at full bore through all three 10 cm pipes and whilst there was some minor flooding at the top of the garden, where water was pouring down the embankment in small water falls, there was no dangerous flooding. Maybe I should have been a hydraulics engineer. (A trench digging labourer is nearer the mark – Ed.) The pool house had only 3 cms of water in it, so the drainage for that was working well too. So far, so good. The next job was to lower the water level in the pool because there was no sign of the rain abating, a job that I did twice during the morning. The duration and intensity of the rain reminded us of the rains in September 2002, just after we moved here, that caused huge flooding and loss of life.
The rain finally stopped at 2.00 pm and we went for a drive to survey the damage. As you can see above, the nearby Vidourle was very high. What you can't see is a bridge which is about 3 metres below the water level.

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As if reading my mind about wanting a decent curry, we receive an offer from Ryanair for free seats (pay only the taxes) during the coming months. We had looked last night and decided the prices were just too high. Because of this offer, we changed our minds about driving to the UK at the beginning of December and book two flights from Nimes to Luton and back for 91 euros (approx £30 each), good eh? We'll travel light and load up with Christmas goodies, especially Tesco's deep filled mince pies. Good, heart stopping, fare.