When it rains it pours

On Tuesday night, Sydney bore mute witness to a massive thunderstorm. It was a spectacular show of light, sound and thumping rain on the parched earth. I’ve always loved thunderstorms; their power and beauty has always mesmerised me. Until Tuesday night.

I was in the shower when the storm hit. I didn’t pay any attention to it, it was just a storm after all, but after a thunderclap that sounded like a small office building had imploded I decided I should get out of the shower and go downstairs to unplug my computer and TV so that they didn’t transform into unrecognisable lumps of molten plastic and circuitry. On the way through the kitchen I noticed that there was a leak coming from the top of the window frame, so I mopped up the water that had already spewed forth and put a pot under the drip to prevent any further wateriness. I smugly smiled to myself, secure in the knowledge that the kitchen bench would last another day, and went to my room.

As I walked into the room I was relieved to see that only a little bit of water had sprayed in through the open window (behind the TV of all places). I was about to get another towel to mop this up when I felt a drip on my head. I looked up and saw another leak coming in through the top of the doorframe. One more pot later and I again smiled smugly to myself that I had averted an aquatic crisis.

It was at about this point that I noticed something shimmering on the walls in one corner. Upon closer inspection I was horrified to discover that there was a veritable waterfall cascading down the brickwork from in between the wall and the cornice and that water was also spluttering in through an air vent. I frantically moved the piles of books that were on the floor as they were getting soaked (in lieu of a bookshelf to sit my books on, I implement a very technically advanced system of piles on the floor). I grabbed still more towels—four bath towels in fact—and lay them over the carpet to try to soak up some of water that had already soaked into the flooring and to prevent any more water from getting through. Since the water was running down the walls, there was no way I could put pots until the drips so I had to basically watch and wait until the rain stopped.

Two days later, Thursday, a steam cleaner was sent by the powers-that-be at the university to clean the carpet and draw out some of the trapped moisture for me. Not three hours later a torrential downpour again enveloped the city, so when I got home on Thursday afternoon I again found a very soggy carpet but thankfully no soggy books.

A plumber was sent over to have a look on Friday. At seven-thirty. AM. I was not pleased and he is only lucky that he’s cute otherwise he may have been met with a much nastier reception at that time of the morning. He has hypothesised that a hole in the gutter has caused water to gush down the wall from the top floor and as it passes my room it seeps through the bricks into the ceiling. Sounds reasonable to me but I won’t be putting anything in that corner for a while I think.