Nanowrimo - Day 22

It's the early hours of Sunday morning and I really should be asleep but, well who'd agree to do Nanowrimo. Quick update. Friday I didn't do anything on my novel. I took my sons to work and had the car radio on. It was the first I had real idea of what was going on up in Cumbria. I came home and switched the television news on and to be honest that's where I stayed all day.

I looked at pictures of places I knew quite well and they'd changed beyond all recognition. I listened to stories of incredible bravery and I watched as people opened the doors for the first time to see the damage, the devastation that flood waters did to their properties. I heard the news of the discovery of the body of that PC Bill Barker, a man who until yesterday we knew nothing about but today is a hero because of his acts of bravery. God it's so awful what happened.

On one of the websites I saw a picture of two women walking through a street, the debris of the floods all around them, one woman had her arm around the other holding her whilst she cried. Yes I've been through that. I've lost my home to flood water and I know exactly how they feel. I know that feeling of crying but they're almost silent tears because there is nothing you can do, you're afraid but you have to hold things together. You put on a brave face, you appear to cope and yet underneath everything is crumbling.

But this isn't about me. I've been through it, I've come through and I've survived and now am thriving but for those poor people they're just at the beginning of it all. Some will handle it better than others but however they do handle it they do need our thoughts and prayers. Practically maybe we can't do anything but just in our own way we can support them.

We take our homes for granted. It's where we go. It's the one place that is ours, everything is familiar and that is so comforting. Whatever the world throws at us, we've got our nest to retreat to. I know when we lost our home and we homeless, the one thing I really longed for, the one thing that could end the nightmare we were living under was to go home but we had no home to go to. That's what those poor people are going through, lost people in many ways. Remember them.

Remember PC Bill Barker's family their pain is something else, something that I can't understand and yet his wife in a statement a few hours after his death said how proud she was of him and that he died doing that job he loved. And a misquote was that it was typical of Bill, helping others.

It's so easy to take our lives, our loved ones, our homes for granted and there is no reason why we shouldn't but every now and again maybe we need to stop and think and appreciate what we have got and that today they're there, tomorrow there are no guarantees.