In the midst of events

In the midst of events that are truly calamitous, you'd have thought that the tiny irritations of everyday life might be somehow less irritating. But it doesn't work like that. Let's talk about socks, for instance. That way they have of slipping down inside your wellies and bunching up under the soles of your feet? Really irritating. 

So this year I bought some special welly socks, and I tried them out today on what was our first really frosty morning of the year. And they were everything cold-weather socks should be: warm, soft, thick and a litle bit scrunchy-feeling. Stomping round the yard at 7.30 in the ice I could practically feel my toes smiling to their little selves. But — and it's a serious but — the socks slipped down. The socks slipped down! The single defining characteristic of welly socks, surely, must be that they don't slip down. I pulled them up, I tried them over my trousers and under my trousers, I rolled them and unrolled them, and nothing helped. I even tried them folded over the tops of my wellies, which stopped them slipping down, obviously, but let in cold air and felt weird. And even when I was standing staring at the broken land with my heart racing in horror, a little part of me was being seriously irritated by the falling-downness of my welly socks.

 Still, just so as not to lose track of the calamities, here's a picture of the view from my bedroom window now.

And two landslides visible across the valley in the other direction. The one to the far right is directly under our friends' house, the other (the big one) is on the edge of a private road like ours, but doesn't seem to have attacked the road.