Kendal

We were spending a pleasant evening, last night, with me recording my radio show and the Minx doing some drawing, when the photos and video from Kendal started to come through on Twitter. We'd seen some during the day but by the evening they had taken on a whole new complexion. What had seemed novel and exciting earlier on took a more tragic turn, with whole roads and estates becoming properly flooded.

I moved to Kendal in 1990, when my first wife and I bought a flat on Mint Street. Occasionally we'd get flyers through the door warning that we were in a flood area which always seemed daft to me; the river was easily half a mile away.

And, indeed, over the following 25 years, I've seen the Kent get quite high and, on one (single) occasion, I've seen it come up over its banks onto our car park at work. (Yesterday, it did flood the whole car park and got as far as the sill to the door into our building.) However, I've never seen anything that even hinted that the flooding that occurred yesterday was a real possibility.

When I heard that Mint Street had been flooded, I couldn't work it out at first. After all, if there was that much water spilling out of the river, why weren't things worse at our office? But then I realised - although this is still supposition - that the water must have been coming down from the hills. Our part of the lakes had a month's rain in one day, yesterday, and I guess it just had nowhere to go.

The devastation has been incredible and the pictures are heartbreaking, especially so close to Christmas. With so many homes affected, it's hard to imagine there being enough people around to come and lay new carpets, fix electrics, re-decorate and so on. I fear people will be in this situation for months.

Down in Chorley, we were spared all this, thankfully. The only hint of it we encountered was when we went to Brockholes to support our friends who had a stall at a Crafty Vintage fair. Even though it was taking place on a floating structure, there were problems just where it was attached to the shore, as you can see. But even though we're used to this sort of thing in Britain - a bit of rain, some puddles - nothing has quite prepared me for seeing somewhere I know so well so suddenly overwhelmed.