It never rains but it pours

Perhaps there has recently been more rain in France than there has been for a while in England. Whatever and wherever it is we do NOT like so much rain. AND not even the sheep like it, because they shelter with their three sets of twins in the shelter of the barn!
It has been raining all night long!! Rain has fallen on most of France for several days and is forecast for yet more days!! The French meteo puts us on yellow alert for flooding but not far away the River Indre is on orange alert!! Our back field is flooded!
Our potagers are flooded because the pond in our hameau is full! Today we say it is "no stones and two ducks". We have never seen it with wildfowl nor without its central stone yet we have witnessed it "a thousand stones and bone dry" but that was two years ago!
As a result of the incessant pluie and because we are lower than the hameau pond but yet higher than the lake below the fields beyond us, the water from the fields passes through our neighbours' lands and our land and into the chemin of the commune! Hence our land is waterlogged, even though the water is trying to by-pass our land as quickly as possible.
The clay soil below the lawn has collected a puddle of water by the well. The natural level of the well is actually 6" below the level of the upper lawn .... and that is significantly higher than our interior stone floor of the house, but, thankfully , and so far, only the toolshed has flooded and that only ( ah... only) because we allowed a rodding point in the waste pipes that go towards the fosse-septique!!! Without this point we would have a back-up problem in the toilet pans! Oh my!!


At a little after 12h noon having baled ourselves out of further problems, France Telecom arrives to correct our faulty telephone line. The two engineers arrive with a cherry picker lorry from Entreprise Escot. We still cannot fathom why they wanted to enter our land to enable the cherry picker to escalate our chimney to reach the telephone wires. They said they had resolved and repaired the problems with some tests and discerned that the problem lay outside of our terrain!! The use of a ladder was forbidden and they never used the cherrypicker!! More later!
Meanwhile, there was insufficient room to manoeuvre such a heavy lorry on our gravel which was waterlogged and as a result the wheels of the cherry picker embedded themselves deeply in the clay subsoil below our gravel!
Eventually, Captain Sensible suggested that our Clio should attempt to pull the cherry picker free and it did!! Therefore the entreprise Escot cherrypicker could escape!
The two engineers could not, would not, could not, would not give the name, address or contact telephone number of their line manager when we emphasised that we needed compensation for the damage to our driveway. Only one engineer apologised and the same one offered to assist us in filling the holes. When the two got back into their vehicle we heard them laughing! We were not amused!!

However, the story has not ended for our telephone line is still faulty!! Await the next saga of this histoire!