Welcome to the weekly round up with posts that you might have missed on Smorgasbord during the week.

It is a windswept Saturday morning although thankfully it has stopped raining. I do feel so sorry for all those affected by the floods in the UK and other countries at the moment. Water is so destructive.

We came home after being away for two weeks at Christmas one year, and opened the door at midnight to find water running down the stairs and the whole house warm and humid, like a tropical greenhouse. Luckily our taxi driver from the airport was a plumber in his day job and he had his tools with him. He and my husband went into the attic and found that a hot water pipe had a one inch long rupture and had been pumping water out since a freeze within days of us going on holiday…