Anyway

As usu­al, the trip to the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford was excel­lent. I learned a lot and met some inter­est­ing people and had fun too, even though I’ve decided that two trips to Europe, with a one-year-old, in 26 days, is a little too much travel in a short peri­od of time. The XML Sum­mer School had day­care, oth­er­wise I really would­n’t have been able to cope. I think the baby enjoyed the trip as well; she made lots of new friends and I star­ted call­ing her “Prin­cess” because of the way she waved and simpered. I am extremely grate­ful for all the work the Sum­mer School organ­isers and the day­care people put in to make the trip as easy as possible.

I did­n’t see a lot of the flood­ing and was only tan­gen­tially affected by it; I do have memor­ies of the water slosh­ing around on the arrivals floor in Ter­min­al 1 when I arrived on the morn­ing of Fri­day 20th July and the attempts people were mak­ing to stop it going down into the base­ment where the Tube and the tun­nels to get to oth­er parts of the air­port are loc­ated. The tun­nel out of Heath­row was down to one lane and it was closed in the oth­er dir­ec­tion. I was­n’t sur­prised to learn later that sev­er­al flights had been cancelled.

Although in the centre of Oxford, where we were, there were few signs of the floods (a couple of roads closed off), sur­round­ing areas were strongly affected. One friend who cycled in to meet us at the pub crawl on Wed­nes­day found it sur­real that his area was full of sand­bags and people pan­ick­ing about the rising ground­wa­ter, while a short bike ride away people were going shop­ping, going to the pub, and gen­er­ally behav­ing the way they would without the floods.

The punt­ing was can­celled of course, the Cher­well was just too high and too fast for it to be safe; there was a cer­tain amount of nervous­ness about los­ing a del­eg­ate or two.

Before the Sum­mer School star­ted, I met up with a friend on the Sunday for lunch. We went to The Fishes in North Hink­sey, a cute little place with a ver­andah and a play­ground and a pic­nic area. Which would have been great for the baby to crawl around in, if it had­n’t been under a cer­tain amount of water at the time.

All in all, I was quite glad to see the sun again when I got home to Van­couver, and to be happy we don’t live on a flood plain.