What we left behind... and what we've gained.

The saddest thing about leaving the UK for a year is leaving behind our wonderful set of friends and neighbours in Beech Place. We moved into Riverside Cottage just short of 2 years ago and it's been such a happy time. Our little cul-de-sac of seven old stone cottages in Penicuik is a lovely little community, and we've got to know and grow fond of all of our neighbours over the time there. Bella the cat has also become a bit of a local feline celebrity, regularly appearing from their linen cupboards or materialising from an upstairs bedroom where she's been sleeping for the afternoon, having casually let herself in through an open window.

Apparently, Beech Place has revolted in protest at our moving. In the two years we were there, we had some pretty bad weather - 3 feet of snow in the back garden, enough rain to make the river at the bottom of the garden rise a couple of feet closer to my veg patch and some powerful storms that knocked out our elecricity for a day - but it's never flooded. All that changed when we left. The day we packed up, last Wednesday, we left the house at about 11am in the midst of some unpleasant drizzle. We drove across to Carlisle where the rain was pelting down and there was a fair amount of surface water on the roads. Apparently, the same bad weather took it upon itself to visit Beech Place, as I took a call from our neighbour around 6pm, who had come home to find that flood waters had saturated Beech Place and risen a foot up the walls on the inside of her house. She kindly took a look inside our place and we hadn't fared much better.

The flood waters had travelled all the way along our corridor, taking lots of mud with them and soaking the carpet in my study. The garage is the first thing the waters would have reached as they coursed down the hill, so it saw the brunt of it.

 

But actually, we were very fortunate. Had we moved out a day later, all of our belongings would have been sitting in boxes on the hall floor, and would have been wrecked by the water. Although our letting agents had a mild panic when I told them the news - with our tenants scheduled to move in just a couple of weeks later - no major damage has been caused, and the floors simply needed a good clean to rid them of the mud. We have a film company coming to use the house for a few days before the tenants arrive so hopefully it will all be back to normal by then.

Our neighbours in France have a lot to live up to, if they're going to match the friendliness and helpfulness of those we left behind. But the signs are good. We dropped in to see our next-door-neighbours-but-one on Sunday, and they promptly served Andy a beer and fixed me a pregnancy-friendly decaf coffee, before launching in to lots of useful information about the local area. Out came a whole batch of brochures and information booklets about what to do nearby. One of them even offered to make me an appointment to register with the local doctor and - if I understood correctly - is going to accompany me there on Wednesday evening. The only snag is that they don't speak English and our French is still pretty rusty. We were told what was apparently a very funny story right at the end, which we understood completely... right up until the punchline. We smiled anyway but I've no idea what they said. I think it was something about rabbits. After an hour of smiling, nodding and saying 'erm....' and attempting to describe the intricacies of paying for French versus Swiss healthcare with half-forgotten GCSE French we emerged with our heads in a bit of a spin. At least I have the next 5 months to get my French up to scratch before the baby arrives, and by then I hope I've found the words for 'ow, that really hurts', 'no one told me it was twins' and 'please can someone ring my husband and prise him away from work to witness the birth of his first child.' Wish me luck.