{"id":348,"date":"2020-03-01T15:35:48","date_gmt":"2020-03-01T15:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/?p=348"},"modified":"2020-03-01T15:36:55","modified_gmt":"2020-03-01T15:36:55","slug":"and-there-came-upon-the-land-a-great-flood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/and-there-came-upon-the-land-a-great-flood\/348\/","title":{"rendered":"And there came upon the land a great flood\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sam wondered where Rosie, his home help was, she wasn\u2019t usually late.  He hoped she hadn\u2019t had an accident.  Slowly swinging his legs over to the side of the bed and with the aid of his crutches, he managed to get to the stair lift. He made some breakfast and wrote a list of food items that he needed, that Rosie could get later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through\nthe window, he could see the palm tree waving in the strong wind.  Quite a\nstorm we had last night<\/em> he thought, he was glad the tree had survived.  It had always been a bit of a joke between\nhis wife Maureen, and himself, a reminder of good times together in sunnier\nclimes.  It was only then he noticed that\nthe garden bench wasn\u2019t in it\u2019s usual spot. \nIt was bobbing up and down in water near the hedge.  He looked towards the road hoping to see\nRosie, but only saw a swift flowing muddy river that seemed to be surrounding\nhis home.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh, Lord help us!\u201d  He said aloud, thinking no one will be able to get to the house.  He felt so helpless.  He painfully made his way round the other downstairs rooms, checking for any water ingress, though if there was, there was nothing he could do about it.  He hoped the neighbours hadn\u2019t been flooded, they had been so good to him when his wife passed away.  He tried to phone them but the lines were dead.  He was truly stuck until the level of the water went down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having\nchecked his meagre rations, he sat at the kitchen table and reread yesterday\u2019s\npaper.  Musing how everything these days\nhad e-mail addresses rather than proper addresses, he remembered that Joe, his\ngrandson, had left his old laptop for him. \nJoe had even given him some lessons, and knowing what his granddad\u2019s\nmemory was like, wrote the instructions down. They had communicated quite\nfrequently until Joe went off to college. \nToo busy having fun<\/em> to talk to his granddad<\/em>, Sam grinned,\nbut  still there was a slim chance of\ncontacting him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The laptop\nwas where he had last used it all those months ago.  The battery needed charging but that wouldn\u2019t\nbe a problem as long as the electricity was still working.  As soon as there was a trickle of a charge,\nSam donned his glasses and slowly went through the instructions.  After typing out his SOS message, Sam hit the\nsend button and crossed his fingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He slept\ndownstairs on the sofa that night, close to the laptop.   The rain had been relentless in the night\nand if anything the water level was higher than before.  He had just finished his last drop of milk,\nwhen he heard someone shouting outside. He hobbled across to the window and was\nsurprised to see a Fire Service rescue boat on his lawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGod Bless\nthe Internet.\u201d Sam prayed out loud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam wondered where Rosie, his home help was, she wasn\u2019t usually late.  He hoped she hadn\u2019t had an accident.  Slowly swinging his legs over to the side of the bed and with the aid of his crutches, he managed to get to the stair lift. He made some breakfast and wrote a list of food […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10158782359051062_103813597863211":"","twitter_1225722811282530305_1225722811282530305":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[121,185],"tags":[192,196,195,194,191,193],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-121","category-the-island","tag-came","tag-flood","tag-great","tag-land","tag-there","tag-upon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbrNJE-5C","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions\/352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}