This is Sarah and Andrew’s 10th wedding anniversary pressie. It’s NOT a bottle of wine, it just looks a bit like one from this angle. It’s actually about double the length of a bottle but of course the ends of the package are out of shot.

It’s all wrapped in a rather jazzy, jolly style even though I do say so myself!

However, it’s not going to get unwrapped any time very soon because we should have given it to them tonight, at their party in London but we have ended up failing to reach there.

That’s partly because we couldn’t leave home until we could be completely sure our dog sitters, travelling 300 miles to sit for us, were going to get through the flood waters that are once again enveloping large chunks of England. They checked out their route, avoiding the M5 which was actually shut, detouring through Oxford and Swindon then set off at 8.30am…….

We spoke on the phone several times so we could check on their progress and we loaded our car and set off for London at 1pm, when we were completely sure they would get here for our precious babies.

Everything was going just fine, apart from having to cross our legs because there was a queue that must have meant a 20 mins wait for the toilets at Exeter services – we even chose not to queue for coffee because that was also shocking. So we ploughed on.

We’d chosen the A303 – no reports of flooding and no reports of hold ups. We were doing well until we ground to a halt in Somerset. We waited and waited, edging forwards a few feet at a time for an age. There were cars doing u-turns all along the way and the road back towards the West Country was blocked by the traffic that had turned around. I said that it couldn’t be completely blocked because there were articulated lorries coming towards us and they surely couldn’t have turned round? In the event, it turned out that yes, they were turning round, and all of the traffic coming towards us was really trying to go the same was we were.

So we edged on until we were at the front of the line. There was a mess up ahead – the road completely blocked by wreckage and a car on fire. Oh dear, poor souls – I hope no-one was badly hurt. The AA man, with a radio link to the police had found out it would be at least two hours before the carriageway would be passable. We did a quick calculation, worked out that even if we got through it in two hours, we were still at least two hours from our destination and the numbers just didn’t add up. We turned around and headed for home.

I spent an hour saying ‘why didn’t we leave earlier?’ ‘why did the floods have to be this weekend?’ ‘is there any other way?’. It was clear that there was nothing we could have done. As David said, if we’d left an hour earlier we may have been one of the cars in the tangled mess ahead. When we got back to the last ‘trunk route’ before we’d stopped, the road was closed, there was pandemonium everywhere. The only route that was clear was the route home – because everyone who’d wanted that route was stuck on the other side of the pile up.

It took us two and a half hours to get home but when we arrived, we had nowhere to go – we’d promised our dog-sitters a night alone so we got in, had a cup of tea, then made ourselves scarce by walking round the hill to the pub for supper and a drink, wandering home in the dark several hours later.

Sarah and Andrew’s pressie was ‘all wrapped up with nowhere to go, we were all dressed up with nowhere to go and had to switch our swanky clothes from a swish night out ‘in town’ for walking boots and waterproofs.

Despite all of the above, we loved the walk (we saw amazing sights in both directions) and had a lovely meal in the pub.

Happy Anniversary to Sarah and Andrew, and to Ginny and Nigel who've got a way to go yet to notch up Sarah and Andrew's ten - they tied the knot two years ago today!

Last year was a rare occasion indeed - I was being cooked for!