Firemen at lakeside

If you want to play crazy golf, you must learn to swim!

Alongside Crow Park

Booths Supermarket and Bus Station

What is left of bridge over the Derwent

Bowling Green - Fitz Park

Fitz Park

Outside Keswick Museum

Fallen Trees along Brundholme Road

Keswick Floods

Friday, 7th January
The river sounds like a jet engine outside and is rising higher by the minute. I can't sleep and am watching it pour over the mill-race wall at the bottom of our garden. Just another few inches and it will be in the septic tank. But it does not rise any further. We awake to find white waves running down its centre and it is flowing past the house at maybe forty miles an hour.

Saturday, 8th January
Have been following Sky's New's Reporter around Keswick. Trees have fallen down along the roads, our supermarket is under water, we have lost one of our bridges across the Derwent. Some of our friends have no electriciy and another couple we know were evacuated from their homes in the middle of the night. One of the launches has crashed into a fuel tanker at the edge of the lake and firemen are trying to haul it out. The diesel has flooded into the lake. Apparantly Carlisle has been hit really bad. We have no TV and cannot get any newspapers through, but we have been watching footage from BBC News on the PC and can't really believe what we are seeing - the whole of the city centre is under water and there is no way in or out at the moment.

For a 3mb movie-clip of our river click here: http://www.templum.com/GretaFlood.avi

Holidays

Xmas & New Year

Not much happened over the holidays as both Marcus and I were still getting over this bug from October which has left us tired. Boxing Day was bright and sunny with a spattering of snow underfoot. I found another path on Latrigg which was fun to explore. We wandered down to the lake on another day and was on top of Castlehead just as the first of the gales began but we laughed it off, not knowing what was to come.

Marcus trundled off to work on Monday and got as far as Ambleside before realizing that it just might be a bank holiday as there was hardly any traffic on the roads. So we did a quick scamper over Grange Craggs and then walked back to Grange for coffee and cakes at John's cafe.