Water

The other week Daughter 2, Son, Daughter-in-Law, the grandchildren and I went to the Botanics. It was sunny but had been raining earlier. We were on our way to the gate to go home when we came across this soggy piece of grass and Grandson began to run about on it, fascinated by the way that he could make splashes fly up.

He kept on running to and fro,

 and back again

 and back again

and back again, really concentrating on his feet and the way the water, though hardly visible before he got there, splashed up when he ran on the grass.

He was so busy, really interested in this strange phenomenon.

He got remarkably wet, well up his thighs, but didn't notice.

When he started getting wet arms too, we decided that it was time to go.

He did have a lovely time.

Yesterday and today I've had a very similar experience - splashing my feet while stamping - but on a friend's carpet. It was less fun. She's in France and phoned us just as I was about to make the evening meal yesterday to say that the chap that comes in to feed her cats while she's away had discovered water dripping copiously from the flat above hers. We rushed round. We and another friend frantically mopped water while the chap upstairs turned his water off at the mains but it was a losing battle since there was clearly a lot of water in the ceiling space which kept on dripping into the many buckets and other receptacles that we put on the carpet. The carpet was absolutely sodden before we got there, as was the lovely parquet flooring and, worse, it had started to leak through to the room below - our friend's flat is on two floors. We took out all of the furniture and moveables that we could and discussed the possibility of moving the carpet, but it's a big room and a big rug and it was exceedingly heavy - too heavy.

Meanwhile the chap upstairs phoned his insurance company and the other friend phoned the home owner's insurance company and they both got precisely nowhere. If you have an emergency, needing strong men to heave a heavy sodden carpet out into the street and install a dehumidifier on a Friday after 5pm, you can forget it, it seems.

We gave up and, having done all we could, came home again at 9pm laden with dripping towels and bedspreads to wash (poor old Mr L was seriously needing his dinner by then) and then returned this morning. The water had stopped dripping but of course nothing had dried much. Then the chap upstairs got his plumber to come and he discovered a corroded pipe, which he fixed, but this involved more water leaking down for a while.

Our friend's daughter arrived at 1pm - she had been in France too but was coming home today anyway. The insurance company had agreed to send chaps down once she was there and could assure them that this was necessary. She had to be quite forceful but they did send men, who took away the dripping carpet and installed a dehumidifier, but we had to mop up puddles on the soaking parquet and I took away a new load of sodden towels (the same ones that I'd washed and dried the previous evening).

Water. Great in the right place. Horrible in the wrong one.