On Friday last week, we watched the rain start, and not stop, as we packed up our bags and suitcases ready for leaving for our holiday in Wales on Saturday.  We drove down the M5 and M4 on Saturday morning, stopped at Techniquest in Cardiff over lunch, and got to the house near Cardigan at 4ish.  Turned on the news…apparently the M5 was completely blocked thanks to traffic jams caused by the floods…we’d got through just in time.  Our other piece of luck was that most people were stuck in Cheltenham on Friday evening…Dh works in Cheltenham and we live in Gloucester - if he’d worked on Friday as initially planned, he wouldn’t have got home!  We had a lovely holiday but watched the news in horror.  Our home town flooded, and so did the water treatment plant so the mains water got turned off.  They were handing out packs of bottled water at supermarkets and bowsers were being stationed all over the city.  Thankfully we were still away during the initial panic period - people pushing and shoving to get the bottled water; taking more than their fair share; filling up from bowsers then selling it(!!!); and so on.  We decided to go back to my parents house in a neighbouring county on Friday night instead of returning in the middle of the night to goodness knew what.  We were fairly certain that our house hadn’t flooded being far from streams and rivers and relatively high up, but I wasn’t too keen on being thrown into life with no water and three littlies on my own as Dh had to work on Saturday.  So yesterday we went and bought water carriers and filled them up from my parents’ taps then my parents drove us home; and then my Dad took me to the supermarket for supplies and bottled water.  The panic has now subsided as Gloucester has got used to having no water and still surviving so there was no queue for bottles and they were just handing them out to whoever wanted them - I thought I’d need proof of having three children, but as people weren’t being silly any more they didn’t worry about it.  We picked up four six-packs of 2 litre bottles of Evian.  There was a huge army tanker of water there and the soldiers and police officers were filling up water carriers for people.  You can do a ‘drive thru’ there, so that’s what I’ll be doing over the next week I guess!  I was worried about taking all three on my own to collect water but it seems that it’ll be easy enough.  Last night we bathed the girls and washed us both in a plastic stacking box - I think we managed to do it with about 7 or 8 litres of water…not bad!  The water from washing is now in the ‘loo flushing water carrier’.  We’ve put loads of buckets and things in the garden to collect rain water for flushing the loo and the girls have really entered into the spirit of things with the new rules of ‘no flushing the loo’ and ‘no turning the taps on’.  We’ve also asked Flopsy and Mopsy to use the potty for wees so we can put them on the compost bin so we don’t have to have them sitting in the loo for ages - Flopsy thinks it’s hilarious!  I think I’ll manage without a bowser/bottled water trip today but may have to go tomorrow.  I don’t think it rained as much as they expected last night so hopefully it won’t have delayed the water going back on at the end of the week.  Mum and Dad are laying bets on how long we stick it out before giving up and going to stay with them.  It seems a lot of people have fled Gloucester as the city is eerily quiet.  It’s all very strange!