We were woken up at 8 o’clock this morning by a thunderous banging on the front door, so cursing whoever it was who was so damn antisocial as to be banging on the front door at that hour, I got up. Which was a mistake. Rather than the warm, dry carpet that normally covers the bedroom floor, this was cold, wet carpet – squelchily-wet carpet in fact.
Turns out there was a leak in the apartment next door, and as our next-door neighbour is apparently away for a couple of weeks, it had been leaking unchecked for some considerable time. So now we’ve got cold, wet, squelching carpets throughout, anything that was on the floor overnight is soaked, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it drying out any time soon. The efficiency and effectiveness of the contents insurance policy is about to be tested. The irony of all this is that living by the side of the river, we’re regularly asked what we’re going to do when it bursts its banks and floods us out (for the record, it would need to rise something like 25 feet and overwhelm the flood barriers before there was real cause for concern.) We now know exactly where the lowest point on the whole floor of the building is – it’s about two feet and slightly to the left of our front door…
