A quiet evening in

So last night I prayed the Michael Leunig prayer and prepared to turn off the lap top and go back to sleep.
One way and another I spent alot of yesterday sleeping - and expect today to be rather similar.
However, I'd just snuggled down with a cat helpfully positioned on my toes when there was an anguished shout from downstairs "I need help!"
Passing swiftly over the inevitable comments from family members that anyone living here undoubtedly needs all the help they can get, it's pretty rare for LCM to voice any such request. Fury at the intransigence of inanimate object?Yes. Frustration at the plethora of smallish animals underfoo? Certainly. Frustration at the foibles of wife and children? Of course.
But "need" and "help" in the same sentence- well this was the first time I could recall hearing such a thing in 22 years of marriage - so I shot downstairs expecting little short of fire, flood and haemmorhage (sp???).
Actually, I wasn't that wrong. Not flood exactly but a steady trickle of water from the trap door that leads to the loft over my study.
The loft that is home for boxes of books for which no shelf space offered. Back at our own house just before we moved, there was a minor tragedy when all my music, which had lived in a loft next to the header tank for our hot water system, somehow got damp and was mouldy and unsalvageable before we got to it, - and that sort of memory lent wings to our rescue mission. LMC and HS were up the ladder and passing down boxes before I'd even got my slippers on. Inevitably at least one box disintegrated in transit, spilling theology all over the study floor, but it looks as if this was new damp, caused by the afternoon's constant rain, so once dried and spread out all over the sitting room, the books seem quite happy. And the curate's collection of terry nappies, preserved long beyond their official working life, has once again come in extremely useful. Maybe Michael Leunig should write a prayer about them? Maybe I should??

Meanwhile, though,the mystery remains, where did the water come in? There is apparently quite a large area covered, though not to any great depth - but no obvious hole in the roof anywhere. Time to phone the poor guy at Church House who deals with property. After 2 sets of real floods and lots of all round bad weather, he emailed all clergy a few weeks ago to say that the housing budget for this year was basically spent...I guess storm and water damage to clergy housing is just one more inconvenient truth to be dealth with as the global environment crisis continues.