I was interviewed for the Mike Parr breakfast show on radio cumbria, talking about our log boiler.

You can catch it for one week only on BBC iPlayer first part is about 40mins in, second part at about 1hr 51mins.

Prince Charles has paid a visit to Cumbria to see how things are recovering after the floods. He spent time on Cockermouth high street ( which has only just reopened to traffic), and at Wordworth House. He also visited my place of work  (James Walkers – biggest employer in Cockermouth) to see how well we were getting on.

It was all recorded for local news Cumbria starts at about 10 mins in, with the Walkers visit at 11mins.

I was working at home so I didn’t get to meet him

My work was badly flooded, haven’t heard the full extent of it yet.  One of my colleagues took the following picture.

Flood at James Walkers the day after (c) Shalana Lambert

Officially closed on Monday, except for key staff. I’m working from home for the until further notice.

We are all OK here in Johnby. Doing a lot better than Cockermouth and Keswick.

river dewent floods into memorial gardens

This is the river in Cockermouth at lunch time on Thursday.  Six hours later it was at least 8 foot higher.

The Riverside Restaurant Cockermouth

This is a balcony over the river cocker, which is usually 2m down.

I went home before the worst of it happened; I can’t imagine how much water there must have been to get 8 foot flowing down main street.

A flooded bookshop in Cockermouth: the town is home to many small businesses (c) skynews

Work wise my company was flooded, not sure exactly how badly yet. Reports vary from 6″ to 4 foot. Looking at the local news showed some aerial video of part of the factory, showing part of the carpark underwater. There were abandoned cars of which you could only see their roofs. The site is shutdown without power and I’m going to be working from home over the next week.

To celebrate we had a day out, and stopped worrying about all the building work, or wool orders.

We went to Ennerdale Water where we had a walk along the lake, the weather was rainy showers – a bit like our wedding day. I found out afterwards that there are some iron age remains so we will have to go back sometime.

Here are some pictures I took between the showers. There were rowan trees with loads of berries everywhere, I don’t think I’ve seen such a proliferation of fruits before.

To finish off the day we went and sat on the Whitehaven harbour for a cup of tea and cake, watched the cormorants and large fish swimming in the marina, and best of all the sun came out!

Katia gave birth to a bouncing billy kid at about 2:30pm today. Mother and son are doing fine.

Cecilia’s brother Henry (+ wife Anna) who live next door at the Hall are opening up as a B & B, you can see the details if you go to the home page of our site . To support this I had to rearrange the things with Google so that they appear first on the list when you search for Johnby Hall. All weekend I’ve been fighting with their webmaster tools trying to get them to update the sitemap. Now I know why it wasn’t working – Google had the goats in, and they must have been eating every sitemap I submitted!

Goats at Google Mountain View headquarters (c) google

Cecilia has been busy knitting for our new nephew ( born last week).

Here are Cecilia, and two grandparents with Nicholas

Cecilia is to be interviewed at home by BBC Look North ( local news), they particularly want to film her spinning.
Cecilia was last seen rushing around in a mad panic screaming about the state of (un)tidiness of the house.

I was just having a look at the latest version of wordpress…so I made a copy of everything and then upgraded that. Something must have been still pointing at the live version so I managed to break it, luckily the upgrade worked! So we are now running on the new version which looks surprisingly like the old version except for the admin pages.