There is a particular feeling that comes with a weather alert pinging on your phone on a Sunday afternoon. You read it, you glance at the sky, you notice it looks much the same as it did an hour ago, and you go back to folding the washing. Most of the time nothing happens. But the half-hour you spend before the rain arrives is worth ten hours of scrambling afterwards, and the beauty of it is that almost everything on the list is useful anyway — a cleared drain, a charged torch, a photo of your boiler serial number.
I started doing this properly the year our street's gutters filled with leaves and the water found the lowest doorstep on the road, which happened to be ours. Nothing dramatic, no drama worth retelling. Just the slow realisation that I had no idea where our stopcock was, and that a box of school photographs had been living on the floor of the under-stairs cupboard for six years.
Start outside, because that is where the water decides where to go
Water rarely comes through walls first. It comes in because it had nowhere else to be. Take five minutes with a bucket and clear whatever is sitting in the gully outside your back door — the sludge of leaves, the bit of gravel, the tennis ball. If you can safely reach a downpipe, check it is actually running clear rather than overflowing at the join. Lift anything on the patio that will float or block: the door mat, the empty plant pots, the recycling box that always ends up sideways.
If you have a car and your street is known for pooling, move it now rather than later, and move it uphill rather than under trees. If there are sandbags or flood boards in the garage that you bought in a panic two winters ago, this is the moment to remember where they live, not the moment to go looking.
Inside, think in terms of the bottom thirty centimetres
The most useful mental exercise is to walk through the ground floor and look only at the lowest shelf of everything. What is sitting directly on the floor that you would genuinely grieve? Paperwork, photo albums, the box of baby clothes, the guitar case, the extension leads. Lift those onto a table or take them up a flight of stairs. It takes minutes and it costs nothing if the rain never comes.
While you are down there, find your stopcock and your fuse box and take a photo of both so you are not hunting by torchlight. Charge the phones and the power bank. Fill a couple of jugs with drinking water. If you have a torch, put it somewhere you can reach without stairs; head torches are better than handheld ones because you need your hands. And photograph a few rooms on your phone — wide shots, nothing artful. If you ever need to prove what a room contained, you will be extremely glad you did.
The kit that lives in a single box all year
I keep one plastic crate on a high shelf and refuse to raid it for spare batteries, which is the only rule that makes it work. Inside: a torch and batteries, a power bank and cable, a folder of copies of insurance documents and ID, a small first aid kit, a wind-up radio, a few bottles of water, long-life snacks the children actually like, wet wipes, and a pair of thick gloves and rubber boots for whoever is going outside. Once a season I swap the snacks and test the torch. That is the entire maintenance burden.
The other half of the kit is information: the number for your insurer, your energy supplier, and the name of a local plumber you would trust. Written on paper, in the crate, because a dead phone makes a very poor address book.
What should I move upstairs first if I only have ten minutes?
Documents and anything irreplaceable: passports, certificates, photographs, hard drives, medication and a change of clothes. Then anything electrical that plugs in at floor level, because that is both expensive and a hazard. Furniture can be lifted onto blocks or bricks later if there is time; sentimental objects cannot be replaced at all, so they go first and everything else waits its turn.
How do I keep the children calm when the weather turns loud?
Give them a job, because a child with a task is rarely a child in a panic — collecting torches, counting water bottles, carrying the snack box upstairs. Explain in plain language what you are doing and why, without pretending nothing is happening, and keep your own narration boring and steady, since they are reading your face far more closely than the sky. Afterwards, let them tell the story back to you a few times; repetition is how small people file frightening evenings away.
If flooding or storm damage has actually affected you before and the forecasts now leave you sleepless, that is a completely reasonable response to a real experience — and it is also worth mentioning to your GP or a counsellor, who can help you separate sensible preparation from anxiety that has outstayed its welcome.
