There were some ceramic plant pots on the decking at the back of our house. I remember going out and idly tipping the rainwater out of them. I went back 15 minutes later and they’d filled up again. Obviously, I didn't have a lot to do that day.

Outside the front window, the two puddles on either side of the street that you always get after heavy rain had started to join together. I decided to head out, thinking this was something big. I didn’t have any wellies so I put on my walking boots on and grabbed my camera. I headed towards Newland and got maybe half way down the street before the water washing across pavement started coming up to my ankles. An old lady coming the other way must have noticed my unease about going on. “It’s only a bit of water,” she said. “What harm can it do?”

My vague plan had been to check out what was happening on Newland, which was one of the places that I'd heard mentioned most on the radio. But I only got as far as my friend’s house on Ella Street. I was kind of arrested by the way she was dressed up like somebody out of the WI circa 1945. Not only that but she was filling sandbags as if she’d been waiting all her life for something like this to happen.

Sandbags were a theme of the day. They’ve never figured in my life previously but I suddenly I became part of the ‘war effort’, filling up sandbags for victory. Actually, they were old pillow cases and we were using sand left over from the Ella Street Festival which had taken place a couple of days earlier. So we were recycling even in the middle of a flood. Very Ella Street.

We sandbagged a couple of houses nearby including an old lady’s a couple of doors down. I don't think any of us really knew what we were doing. We were just laying down bags in places that looked like they might have been in danger, such as doorsteps, but completely neglecting other obvious flood risks like airbricks. I think it was just a sense that we should be doing something but there weren’t any ‘adults’ around to tell us what (I’m only 37), so we were just playing at being flood wardens.

A few more people came out to move cars to higher ground and some of them stayed to help. They added their voices to the self-righteous indignation that had been building up for some time against drivers speeding faster than usual down the street, paying no attention to the conditions or the wash their cars were creating. I’d been listening to the radio before I came out and among the predictable calls blaming the council, there had been quite a lot of complaints about this whitevan man menace. Someone came up with the idea of putting a road block at the end of Salisbury Street to stop the ‘flood tourists’ and we rigged up some plastic gas bollards across the end of the street. At the time I thought everyone was making too much of a drama out of it. But the next day I saw some of the videos people had posted on youtube. Many of these were taken from the passenger seats of cars and had enlightening commentaries, which usually went something like: “Look mate! Look at the waves I’m making with my car! LOL!” So maybe these mild-mannered vigilantes had a point.

I left at this point. I was getting cold and it also dawned on me that I'd probably spent enough time messing around playing the community hero and should go and check on our house. At home, the electricity had gone off downstairs and I spent a nervous couple of hours listening out to hear if the fridge and the freezer were still humming. I eventually came up with the probably dangerous solution of hooking them up to the upstairs sockets via a spaghetti-like system of extension cables.

The day itself didn’t affect me particularly badly although we did subsequently get secondary flooding and have had to move out to a rented house over the road until the damage is repaired. At least I was able to get dry and warm again but I can appreciate for a lot of people that wasn’t the case and their memories of the day are a lot darker than mine.

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