You must forgive me if the story is a bit jumbled here and there. The recollections are vivid but the sequence of events may not be so it's what you might call 'stream of consciousness'.

It was day two if I recall rightly when we, or I to be to be more accurate, woke to the sight we had dreaded; the water was in the house. The area behind what should be the garage that backs on to the small back yard is lower than the rest of the ground floor. I opened the through door from the hall to see it had filled with water.

The garage area itself, the hall, downstairs shower room and small office were as yet unaffected but the water was of a such height, 3-4 inches, that that would be a matter of time. We'd moved everything portable upstairs and cleared shelves to a height of 2-3 feet but there were things we could not move and there was water lapping around the feet of the stand up piano we were 'looking after' for Sandra's daughter. This was an image that appealed to the media for some reason and featured in several newspaper or radio interviews. Just thought I'd drop in about radio and newspapers. We were to appear on TV too before this was out and would became very media savvy.

A folded rug we had placed against the door, remember it opened outwards so we couldn't get sandbags in place, was sodden through and floating.

There was nothing immediate to be done so I performed the usual morning duty of making tea before breaking the news to Sandra as gently as I could. She was of course distraught. It's difficult to explain the sense of violation that comes from having water in the house. the intrusion was none the less for having two dry floors above.

I had sometimes fantasised, given Datchet's past history of flooding, about looking down on floating neighbours from our elevated first floor perch, a fantasy partially fuelled by the former neighbour who was a keen yachtsman and parked a large yacht outside the window one day, it's decks on a level with our first floor kitchen window. Anyway, fantasies aside, the benefits of a dry upstairs situation can be overestimated when you can't enter or leave your home without paddling to or from the front door ankle deep in water. This was soon to be our situation.

We had begun as I said to move things upstairs but more rescue work would be needed before the water got much higher. We had to make a decision re which bits of furniture were rescuable and which were disposable and could be used to raise the bits we wanted to save off the ground. Small tables were sacrificed to get the expensive leather sofa off the ground. Given it was a very tight fit and only just fitted into the space this was not an easy job.

The piano would have to be sacrificed. Not only was it so heavy that four adults would be required to lift it off the ground but neither of us could play it and it was occupying space that prevented us rearranging the room as we might have liked.

There were some positive outcomes to what we subsequently went through; though whether they outweighed the huge disruption and inconvenience is another matter altogether. At the point the water entered the house all we were feeling was the violation of it all.

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