In sympathy for our flood situation, my sister baked and posted us a big batch of her fantastic raisin & oatmeal cookies.
I’ve eaten like six of them already. Turns out I stress-eat. Who knew?
Tag: flood 2026
F-Day plus 19
Nineteen days after my house flooded, causing extensive damage on the ground floor, the insurance company has finally accepted the claim and is willing to pay for our temporary accommodation in the meantime (a few days in a hotel, a few days with friends although that’s not paid-for, four weeks in two different holiday lets), although we’re still waiting for their thumbs-up on a proposal for a ~6-month let of a house to live in while our floors are replaced and our kitchen rebuilt and whatnot.
Meanwhile, yesterday a surveyor came around and looked at all of our walls. Everything still feels like it’s taking a very long time. I appreciate that insurance companies are a maze of bureaucracy and procedure, but from “this side” of the table – living and working out of strange places, never really feeling “unpacked” but without it being a holiday – it’s all a bit of a drag!
Caution: No Swimming
Hurrah! I just made my first successful submission to Curious Cones, a weblog collecting photographs of traffic cones spotted in unusual places.
I spotted this cone while the younger child and I took a walk to the next-nearest village to our temporary accommodation, in order to find a geocache, tag some benches for OpenBenches, and have a cafe brunch.
Anyway: if you’re not following Curious Cones, it’s exactly as delightful as you might expect.
F-Day plus 12
It’s now twelve days since a flood struck my house, causing the ground floor to be submerged under a couple of feet of water and ultimately leading us to kick off an insurance claim process.
And man, a home insurance claim seems to be… slow. For instance, we originally couldn’t even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10 (later improved to F-day plus 7). The insurance company can’t promise that they’ll confirm that they’ll “accept liability” (agree to start paying for anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will check for structural damage until F-day plus 191.
Oh, and the insurance company have advised us to look for something like a “12 month let with a 6 month break clause”, which is horrifying. We could be out of our home for up to a year.
Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place… but simultaneously still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting the house- currently stripped of anything damp and full of drying equipment – feels like stepping onto another planet… or like one of those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar except it’s wrong somehow.
But spending time away from it, “as if” on holiday except-not, is weird too: like we’re accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while we’re waiting for the insurance company to do their initial things, it feels like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.
And I worry that by the time they’re committed to paying for us to stay somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might have to contract for speed. There’s no hurry any more. We’re expected to just press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending that everything’s normal.
So yeah, it’s a weird time.
Footnotes
1 I’m totally committed to this way of counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like it might be a worthwhile way of keeping track of how long all of this takes.
2 Normally, the younger and older child are able to get to school on foot or via a bus that stops virtually outside our house, each day, so an hour-plus round-trip to their schools and back up to twice a day is a bit of a drag! We’re managing to make it work with a little creativity, but I wouldn’t want to make it a long-term plan!
3 And do some work from there, amidst the jet engine-like noise of the dehumidifiers!
Dog tired
Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got back “home”. So I came in and lay on the floor.
At which point the dog decided I was a pillow.
Fake Herons
I saw a heron this morning, and it reminded me of a police officer.
Right now, while my house is… not-so-inhabitable… I have a long drive to drop the kids off at school, and this morning it took us alongside the many flooded fields between our temporary accommodation and the various kid drop-offs.
Stopped at traffic lights, I watched a heron land in what would be best-described as a large puddle, rather than in the lake on the other side of the road. The lake, it turns out… was “guarded” by one of those fake heron things.
You’ve seen them, probably. People put them up to discourage territorial birds from visiting and eating all their fish.2 If you haven’t seen them, you might have at least spotted the fake owls, whose purpose is slightly different because they scare off other birds.
Anyway: I found myself thinking… do birds actually fall for this? Like scarecrows, it feels like they shouldn’t (and indeed, scarecrows don’t always work, and birds can quickly become accustomed to them). But clearly they work at least a little…?
Anyway, I found myself reminded of a geocaching expedition I went on outside Cambridge a couple of years ago. At around 6am I was creeping around outside a shopping centre on a Saturday morning, looking for a tiny magnetic geocache hidden behind a sign. I’d anticipated not having to use much “stealth” so early in the day… but nonetheless I kept getting the feeling that I was being watched.
It took me a few minutes until I worked out why: the local Home Bargains had put up a life-size standee of a police officer in just the right position that I kept catching him in the corner of my eye and second-guessing how much my digging-through-the-bushes looked incredibly suspicious!
I did a double-take the first time I spotted the officer, but soon realised he was fake. But the feeling of being watched persisted! There’s clearly something deeper in human psychology, more-instinctive, that – as social animals – gives us that feeling of being watched and influences our behaviour.
There’s a wonderful and much-cited piece of research from 2010 that describes how cooperative behaviour like proper use of an honesty box increases if you put a picture of some eyes above it: the mechanism’s not fully understood, but it’s speculated that it’s because it induces the feeling of being watched.
I reckon it’s similar with birds. They’re not stupid (some of them, like corvids, are famously smart… and probably many predator birds exhibit significant intelligence too), but if there’s something in your peripheral vision that puts you at unease… then of course you’re not going to be comfortable! And if there’s another option nearby5 that’ll work, that’s an easy win for a hungry bird.
You don’t need to actually believe that a scarecrow, a plastic bird, a poster of some eyes, or a picture of a bobby is real in order for it to have a psychological impact. That’s why – I believe – a fake heron works. And that’s why, today, a heron reminded me of a police officer.
Footnotes
1 I guess actual herons can’t tell the difference?
2 Presumably the same technique doesn’t work with sociable birds, who would probably turn up to try to befriend or woo the models.
3 I don’t know, but I do wonder, whether the picture is actually of a police officer or of a model. If I were a police officer and I knew that my likeness was being used at supermarkets and the like, I’d be first to volunteer to any call-outs to anywhere nearby them, so any suspect who ran from me would keep spotting me, following them, at every corner. You get few opportunities for pranks as a copper, I reckon, but this one would be a blast.
4 I wonder if a fake angler is more- or less-effective than a fake heron. Somewhere, an animal psychology PhD student is working out the experimental conditions to answer this question, I hope.
5 Remember: a bird can have a birds-eye view of feeding spots! If one option’s gonna make them feel like they’re being watched by a predator or a competitor, and another nearby option looks almost-as-good, they’re gonna take the alternative!
Dan Q found GCAWR04 Take an Allotment Break
This checkin to GCAWR04 Take an Allotment Break reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The family and I are staying in Lyneham for a couple of weeks following the flooding of our house (on the other side of Witney). This morning the younger geokid, the geopup, and I came out for a walk to find this geocache as well as to explore Milton-under-Wychwood and tag some of the memorial benches for OpenBenches (1, 2, 3, 4).
We sat near the cache and the geokid immediately found it. Looks like we’re the second signatories of the New Year: somebody beat us to it on 5 Feb! TFTC.
6-12 Months
The insurance loss adjusters came around this morning, accompanied by damage assessors and electricians and whatnot.
The process continues to feel painfully slow. We’re still one to two weeks from confirmation that the insurance company will accept liability and be ready to start paying for, y’know, the immediate concerns like where we’re going to live.
“How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?” I asked, warily.
“Six to twelve months?” guessed the loss adjusters.
Erk! 😭
Note #28280
While cleaning up/assessing damage following our house flood, I finally found a lost digital stylus I’ve been looking for for a couple of months.
Unfortunately it’s been sat under the water line so I don’t know yet if it survived. But it’s FOUND, at least!
(Look at me, finding ways to stay positive!)
F-Day plus 3
It feels inconceivable to me that we’re only at F-Day plus three; that is, three days since a flash flood rushed through the ground floor of our house and forced us to evacuate. We’ve been able to visit since and start assessing the damage, but for now I figured that what you’d want would be the kinds of horrible pictures that make you say “wow; I’m glad that didn’t happen to me”.
These pictures are all from F-Day itself (which happened to be Friday the 13th; delightful, eh?):
We’ve had a few nights in Premier Inns, but it’s a new week and it’s time to hassle the insurance company to come and have a look around. And then, maybe, we can start working out where we’ll live so the repair work can start.
Ugh.
Normal life
I want normal life back now, please.
I appreciate that it’s only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that’s necessarily followed, it feels like it’s been so much longer.
Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this hotel been using a pogo stick since around 05:30?
The calm after the storm
This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.
Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we’ll be living for the near future.
But strangely, what’s thrown me first this morning was that I couldn’t make this post submit.
Turns out my crosspost-to-mastodon checkbox was checked. Because my Mastodon server… runs on my homelab. Which is currently unplugged and in one of the highest rooms of a house with no electricity or Internet access. (Or, probably, running water… although that matters less to a homelab.)
I think I moved it before it got wet, but yesterday is such a blur that I just don’t know. I remember we spent some time fighting back the water with sandbags and barricades. I remember the moments each room began to fail, one by one, and we started moving whatever we could carry to higher floors (max props to folks from Eynsham Fire Bridade for helping with the heavy stuff). But if you ask me what order we rescued things in, I just don’t know.
I guess we’ll find out when the waters recede, and it’s safe to go check.
Fucking hell.
Flood
My house is under water.
Well, fuck.