Sturm und drang ...
Beethoven is without question my favourite composer. Last Thursday evening (after my last post about the bath tub) there was such a beautiful sunset over the valley that as we sat down to our evening meal I simply had to stream Beethoven’s 6th Symphony while we ate. I should of course have known that the third movement (aptly named "The merry gathering of country folk") ends on an imperfect cadence that leads without pause into the fourth movement which is of course the storm. Beethoven depicts a violent thunderstorm with wind, rain thunder and lightning. And so it was that Friday and Saturday delivered on Beethoven’s promise, literally and figuratively.
It poured with rain all day on Friday making the ground completely sodden, but then at about 5 pm on Friday the heavens opened and a violent storm deposited about 40mm of rain on Cracroft Farm in about 20 minutes. It was complete carnage. We had to drive to Huonville in all of this and the level of flash flooding on the road had to be seen to be believed. At times the road was almost covered in water and it felt as though it was a matter of time before we were cut off from getting home. We did make it make it back to the farm, but the sight that met us wasn’t pretty. As I have mentioned before, Cracroft Farm is on a slope that heads down to the Huon River, and it felt as though all our topsoil was headed that way! Luckily our newly renovated driveway coated in FCR (finely crushed rock) stood up really well and the stone wall behind the shed prevented the embankment from collapsing (there were minor collapses where the wall remains unfinished).
Saturday was spent trying desperately to restore some semblance of order to the farm and particularly the area around the shed. Little did we know that the figurative storm was about to strike. This came with in the form of the fantastic news from the UK that Cath’s sister, Sarah Worthington, who is the Downing Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge, had been made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to English private law in the Queen's birthday honours list. We didn’t play Beethoven with the evening meal but instead, over a bottle of fine red wine, we sang along lustily to a YouTube version of Rogers and Hammerstein’s famous song from the musical South Pacific:
Nothin' in the world,
There is nothin' you can name
That is anything like a Dame!
As one friend pointed out to us – we will now have to mind our P’s and Q’s at any future family do’s – so we thought we had better party while we could.
The first day of the working week was once again a glorious spring day and it was back to mundane matters on the farm. Or perhaps not so mundane, because today our eagerly awaited water tanks arrived. We now have two beautiful stainless steel water tanks located behind the shed, each capable of holding 24 thousand litres of water. If only they had been around on Friday night, a meagre 48 thousand litres may not have spilled over the land ...
VASBYT!
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