flood 2026 – Dan Q

Chicory Keys

Towards the end of last week we picked up the keys to the Chicory House.¹ We’ve now officially moved in to the place we’ll be calling home for the next six months or so, while we wait for our Actual House to be repaired following our catastrophic flood in February.²

As part of my efforts to travel light, I use a pretty small wallet – a lump of carbon fibre about the size of a deck of cards³ that contains my ID, bank cards, and – in pocket at the back – my essential keys. Typically that’s my front door key and my bike lock key.

Minimalist carbon fibre wallet, balanced on two fingertips, with parts of a Halifax Mastercard credit card showing from behind an elasticated band. — The keys tuck in around the back, but there’s a “hook” on the end to which additional keys can be ringed. Sometimes I hook up a second-factor hardware token to it when I’m travelling with one.

And so when I received my front door key to the Chicory House, I had to decide: where does this key belong?

The obvious answer would have been to remove the front door key for my actual home from its special place within my wallet and replace it with the Chicory House’s front door key. That’s the one I’ll need most-often for the foreseeable future, right? My regular front door key can move to the supplementary hook, on a ring, and/or be removed entirely and taken with me only when I need to visit my uninhabitable home.

But that’s not what I did.

Reverse side of my wallet showing my regular house key folded-out from its special spot, and the Chicory House key attached to the hook. — I didn’t even think about what I was doing until I noticed, afterwards, that I’d chosen to put the Chicory House key on the “supplementary keys” hook rather than in the “primary keys” spot.

This made sense as an instinctive move: it’s where I’d clip on the key to any of the half-dozen or so AirBnBs I’ve lived in for the last couple of months, after all! But for a house I’m going to live in for half a year or more it doesn’t seem so rational.

But I haven’t put it back. I think I’m keeping it this way. My regular key gets to keep its special spot because it represents the lost status quo and the aspiration to return. Sure, it’s less-practical for me to keep it there, but its position is symbolic, not sensible.

Swapping the two over would feel like giving in: like caving to the inevitability of us being out of our home for an extended period. Keeping the key where it is means that every time I put my hand in my pocket I’m reminded that the current arrangement is temporary; things will go back to normal. And that’s nice.⁴

Footnotes

¹ The house isn’t actually called that, of course. That’s our nickname for it, on account of it being a substitute for the real thing.

² The flood was exactly two months ago today, which makes today “F-Day plus 60”. We’ve spent most of the intervening time hopping from AirBnB to AirBnB.

³ As somebody who often carries a deck of cards, this is a pretty-convenient size to me!

⁴ That said, the Chicory House is way better than most of the AirBnB’s we’ve been living in, and I’m especially loving being able to sleep on my own familiar mattress again! While I wouldn’t want to live here forever like I’d be happy to in the place we’ve called home since 2020, it’ll certainly suffice for the immediate future. A stepping-stone back towards the lives we’d built before.

Unpacked Kitchen

Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!

A moderately tidy kitchen with faux-marble countertops, under free on which an open large cardboard box can be seen. In the distance, a conservatory contains a small dining table cluttered with computer equipment. — The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!

Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬

Woof! Burglars!

The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture?

F-Day plus 55

It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability.

Today, we make a change. Today we’re moving into a medium-term let: sonewhere we can stay for the… say… six months or so it’ll take to actually repair our house so we can move back in. We’ll have our own space again in a way we haven’t in a couple of months.

I know the hard work isn’t done. Our house is still a wreck! But it feels like, perhaps, we’re beginning the second act of the three-act play “The Year Of The Flood”. And that feels like progress.

Right, I’d better go move house! (for like the seventh time this year…)

Surprise Pig

It’s my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we’re living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.

Except the dog isn’t even here. My brain keeps getting tricked… by this statue of a pig:

Garden Office

I’ve lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we’ve been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its pros and cons (and each hasn’t felt like “home”).

But man, I really like the “garden office” at our current one. So nice to work in the sun!

(I don’t like the slow WiFi as much, but yeah… pros and cons!)

F-Day plus 50

The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure!

Dan Q found GC1ZEKG Church Micro 2809 – Bledington

This checkin to GC1ZEKG Church Micro 2809 - Bledington reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF for the geohound and I as we came out for a walk from the house we’re borrowing this week – the latest of many AirBnB-like week-long lets we’ve had to decamp to after our house was rendered uninhabitable by a flash flood around fifty days ago. Hopefully the last, though, as the insurance company may at last have found us somewhere to live longer-term while our house is repaired!

Cache container seemed slightly exposed by damage to a nearby fence so I tucked it back in slightly deeper than I found it.

TFTC and for showing us this delightful footpath which is sure to become a favourite walking route for the doggo and I during our week here.

Food divided by Distance

I was pretty ill yesterday. It’s probably a combination of post-flood stress and my shitty lungs’ ability to take a sore throat and turn it into something that leaves me lying in bed and groaning.

I spent most of the morning in and out of a fitful sleep, during which I dreamed up the most-bizarre application: a GPS tracker app that, after being told your destination and what you were eating, reported your journey progress to social media by describing where you were going and how much of your food was left¹.

I should be clear that in the dream, I wasn’t the one that invented this concept; in fact, I didn’t even understand it at first (maybe I still don’t!). In the dream I was at some kind of unconference event with a variety of “make art with the Web” types, and I missed a session by falling asleep². I woke (within the dream) right before the session ended and rushed in to see what was being presented, and only got the tail-end of the explanation of how a project – this project – worked, after which I felt rushed to try to understand it before somebody inevitably tried to talk to me about it.

But it could work, couldn’t it? If you’re one of those people who routinely tracks and shares their location (like Aaron Parecki, whose heatmapping inspired my own) or journeys (like Jeremy Keith does), it’s a way to add a bit of silliness to that sharing.

I’m probably not going to implement this. It is, in the end, the kind of stupidity that could (should?) only appear in the dreams of somebody who’s got a bad head cold.

But if you manage to take this idea and turn it into something… actually good?… let me know!

Or if you’ve just got a cool, “Web 2.0-ey” idea for the name of an app that tracks both your journey progress and your meal consumption, I’d love to hear that too.

Footnotes

¹ Under the assumption that its consumption would be evenly distributed throughout the journey. Because everybody does that, right? Counting the number of steps they make before taking another equal-sized bite. Right?

² Even in my dreams, I can dream of falling asleep. And, sometimes, of dreaming. A fever probably helps.

F-Day plus 38

It’s 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today’s the first of our ‘BER’ assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to ‘write off’: to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with an equivalent new one.

So today, while I work, I’m watching a trio of men carry all of the soft furnishings, white goods, and rugs, plus any plywood/MDF-based furniture that got soaked into a pair of vans on the driveway, making notes where possible of the makes and models of things as they go.

My home is rapidly becoming more cavernous and echoey.

Dan Q found GC79ZK3 Wootton Word Wall

This checkin to GC79ZK3 Wootton Word Wall reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’ve never come across the TV series nor this kind of puzzle before, and opted to solve it in an unconventional way. We’re living for a week in an AirBnB nearby – one in a long series of short term lets while we and our insurance company find us sonewhere longer-term, following flood damage to our house last month.

This morning, the younger geokid and I came out for a walk with the geopup. After a little difficulty getting a GPSr fix we eventuality found a good-looking host, and after a few laps we had the well-camouflaged container in our hands. A good sized, well maintained container and an interesting puzzle, even if the way we solved it might be considered by some to have been cheating!

SL (using my own pencil; the one in the cache is blunt and I forgot to bring my sharpener), TFTC.

F-Day plus 35

It’s F-Day plus 35, and I’m spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I’m “between” two AirBnBs.

The dog, who doesn’t normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what’s happening downstairs.

The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.

A Hundred Inconveniences

It’s F-Day plus 31 – a whole month (and a bit; thanks February) since our house filled with water and rendered us kinda-homeless.

We continue to live out of a series of AirBnB-like accommodations, flitting from place to place after a week or fortnight. I can’t overstate how much this feels like a hundred tiny inconveniences, piling up in front of me all at once and making it hard to see “past” them.

An attractive Cotswold-stone converted barn with a gravel driveway and a broad grassy lawn. — Our current two-week stint is spent at a place that’s perfectly delightul… but it’s not *home*.

They’re all small potatoes compared to the bigger issue of, y’know… our house being uninhabitable. But they’re still frustrating.

I’m talking about things like discovering your spare toothbrush heads are at the “wrong” house. Or having to take extra care to plan who’s going to use which car to go to the office because the kids and the dog need dropping off (because our lives were all optimised for our local walking and bus routes). It’s a level of cognitive load that, frankly, I could do without.

Dan and JTA sit with pints of beer in a cluttered brewery, at a table with large tomato cans repurposed as holders for chilli oil and pizza cutters. — I’m trying to look on the bright side. One particular highlight was JTA and I discovering the epic pizza restaurant inside the brewery that’s about four minutes walk from where we’re living, right now.

Meanwhile, any relief is slow to come. We’re still without a medium-term plan for somewhere to live, because even though the insurance company has pulled their finger out and agreed to pay for say six months of rental of a place, we’re struggling to find a suitable property whose landlord is open to such a short-term let.

When the house first flooded and friends told me that I’d be faced with many months of headaches, I figured this was hyperbole. Or that, somehow, with the epic wrangling and project management skills of Ruth, JTA and I combined, that we’d be able to accelerate the process somewhat. Little did I know that so many of the problems wouldn’t be issues of scale or complexity but of bureaucracy and other people’s timescales. Clearly, we’re in it for the long haul.

It feels silly that we’re still in the first quarter of this 2026 and already I’m looking forward to next year and the point where we can look back and laugh, saying “ah, remember 2026: the year of the flood?” Sigh.

Dan Q found GC4MJY0 R’n’R #9 – Thumper

This checkin to GC4MJY0 R’n’R #9 – Thumper reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The younger geokid and I had a plan, this morning, to drive out from our temporary (post-flood) accommodation in New Yatt, park at St. Peter’s in Wilcote, and then walk the dog around the area between Wilcote and Ramsden while we collect a few more caches from this excellent series.

Unfortunately our plans were scuppered early on when we discovered that a Scouts troop had completely occupied all possible parking spaces in Wilcote, and a platoon of children, supervised by some tired-looking adults, were beginning a walk around what looked likely to be the exact same routes we were planning.

So we came at it from the other angle. Driving around to Finstock, we parked near The Plough and came across the network of footpaths from the other end.

By the time we were at the corner of this field the kid and dog were enjoying running around in the Spring sunshine, and once we got to the GZ the cache itself was a quick and easy find… although the kid did take the time to stop and make a crude joke about the rabbit’s bum being corked!

Cold Giraffe

My mum painted a cold giraffe onto a postcard and sent it to me. It’s been added to my collection.

She sent it to my “send me a postcard” PO box (even though she’s got my actual address), which I’m guessing was an indication that it was being “sent” to me “as if” she were a stranger on the Internet.

Or possibly it’s just because I’m, y’know, living in a variety of different places with only intermittent trips back to my actual house, while my insurance company and their contractors do their work to dry out our walls and floors, assess the damage caused after my house flooded, 24 days ago.

Whatever the reason, it was an uplifting piece of mail to receive.

In other things-are-improving news, our insurance company (finally! – after lots of checks and paperwork at their end) accepted liability for paying for the repairs we’ll need and for our temporary accommodation (including the places we’ve already been living for the last few weeks).