So, last night there was a bit of a storm here. When I say ‘bit of a storm’, I mean, of course ‘fuck-buggery – who pissed the god of weather off?’. Thunder, for over an hour and a half, which seemed to consist of not one but two rather angry storm systems circling around the witchery, one directly overhead, one rumbling off into the distance over the nearby forest. Rain so aggressive that this morning we are literally cut off – the many routes away from the witchery are all flooded, and we are really quite relieved that our house is on something of a rise in an otherwise very flat little area – up the lane, several houses have been flooded out, and the bottom of our garden shows a clear tideline where the water came in the night. Frankly, I’m glad I’m not a chicken – the chooks’ house is only about a foot or so off the ground, and there was a lot of water about last night… The irony? The witchling slept through it all, even the window-rattlingly loud thunder directly overhead. I had her snuggled up against me, thinking that any minute the wailing would commence, and I waited, and I waited, and… it just didn’t. No accounting for some people, is there?

One slight concern is that the mains water connection we had installed (remind me to moan about that, incidentally – we have an ongoing battle with the contractor we used [we owe them about £2500, but haven't paid because the work hasn't been done to regulation standards] and with South-West Water, which has mysteriously volunteered to adopt some of the pipework as their own, for reasons which remain both unknown and disturbingly nepotism-like) is right in the path of the normal flood route. This area floods a lot, whenever there is persistent rain. So, er, all the time, then. The drains aren’t even vaguely coping, and the water is running straight down the road.

In fact, not just straight down the road, but right off with the road:

 Interesting, non? Yes folks – so wet was the night, and so crappy the road surface, that the whole thing has been badly eroded. And of course our water meter is right about there. Keep your fingers crossed that the connection survives, eh?

In other news, I shall shortly be posting pictures of Quercus’s Grand Erection. (Sorry. I had to say that. You know how it is.) Yes – the extension. Not finished, but coming along. Last night reminded us that one of the rooflights is still leaking rather badly; unfortunately the bit one needs to get at in order to lather sealant all over the place requires a level of dexterity something akin to Nimble Fingers the Nimble, From Nimble Town. And that only on an extra-specially nimble day. So, for now, the time-honoured solution: a tarp.

Also, tarps on the woodpile – at the moment, we are burning wood which is decidedly damp, which is basically a really bad idea as it clogs your chim-chiminee up with lots of nasty tar. Oops. We wanted to put up a wood-framed woodstore this summer, but what with one thing and another, the project has yet to be started, and the extension is still on the go. The irritating thing is that of course, because we are thinking of doing something, the planning regs have recently changed, meaning that now, if we want the woodshed to be a lean-to construction, against the side of the house, we have to use materials which match the original house. Or so we are told by a halfwit planning officer. We have to apply for planning permission, and pay £130 or so, if we want the outside facing of the woodstore to be anything other than a pretty close match to the rest of the house, i.e. cob and thatch. Bear in mind that if we only needed listed building consent, the application would be free.

Now, you might think that living in a listed building, and thus having to apply for listed building consent, theoretically, if you change a light fitting, might mean that the fact that we were pretty much going to have to do something in-keeping for the woodshed, because otherwise, the conservation officers can make you undo whatever you’ve done. But no – planning permission is required as well, just to make extra-super-specially sure that we do something appropriate. The irony of this, she said, sitting in a room with cement-based plaster and a uPVC window fitted at the back of the house, is not lost on us. It sucks, it does. It sucks large hairy things through very small spaces. It’s either going to mean relocating said woodstore so we can get away with doing things the way we want to, or making laths and an earth plaster up. At the moment, we’re inclining towards the latter; we both enjoy buggering about with large quantities of mud, be it as clay and pottering or as cob and house-buildering, and speaking as the owners of three tonnes of lime plaster, somehow knocking up some earth plaster and buggering about with some of ye olde lathes seems quite fitting.