And the rain came down...

Happily though, the floods didn't come up, unlike a few years ago...

I moved to Cambridge in 2008, so I was living and working in Oxford during the 2007 flooding that pretty much took the country by surprise. The journey in had been a bit odd for me as the bus semi-flooded between two villages thanks to what we all thought was just an abnormally deep puddle (similar photo here. The bus route eventually ended up like this which cut me off from work for a few days. It had been a normal day at work (the rain was constant and heavy but we'd had no news of flooding) when my colleague Rod stuck his head out of the sales office and said "We're leaving, now." Turned out his wife had seen water creeping up his road and given that it eventually led to my village (rapidly becoming an island) we headed off. On the way back I phoned Dad and told him to get out of Kidlington and we ended up travelling through Bladon in a mini-convoy (we were 5 minutes ahead of him).

Already the road had been cut by water and it was a case of one car crossing at a time from each direction - two cars were already stuck at that point and by the end of the day the road was impassable. Rod made it home by driving the last half-mile with water lapping at his bumper having dropped me at the top of the hill just as Dad pulled in. I then had the most fun walking around the Post Office to get some dinners as Mum hadn't made it into town (Witney was cut off at that point) and found the top of the village not flooded but under a constant flow of water - new shoes were purchased a few days later...

This time around the water has not been as harsh to Witney as before - Dad's chuch's BBQ even went ahead on Friday and, with the help of a properly MacGyvered tarp we even had a cover for the chefs - the rain had stopped by the end.

Other parts of the country haven't been so lucky this time around, as these Blips from CoombeDog, Uplymer and ChrisHilton down in Lyme Regis show.