Harry's Blog

Outside both the front and back of our house are piles of wreckage, the many expensive belongings destroyed by the flood of last Friday.

This has been a very difficult few days for us. Both in terms of seeing our home wrecked and our plans for the months ahead thrown into confusion. It's also been very hard because of another event unfolding in our family has shocked us to the core.

But back to the flood and of course our priority is for our children. They are safely being looked after in Dorset where they will no doubt stay never to return to this bit of West London.

I am here alone. My wife has joined the children in Dorset and will be looking for a new home for us there. Meanwhile I have to tie up the loose ends here - deal with matters of insurance and the like before heading down to Dorset to see our children who I miss terribly.

With only a couple of months of my wife's job left it would have made the most sense for us to cut our losses and just leave for Dorset permanently now. But we are unable to do that. Getting maternity pay out of her employer was hard enough, so we can't do anything that would jeopardise that. We'll need that money in the months ahead.

So it looks like we'll be making a home in Dorset sooner rather than later and my wife will have to commute a few days a week back to London. It's not ideal at all and I do worry for her commuting such a distance while in the second half of her pregnancy. But we have little choice really if we want to start our new life on a firm financial footing.

We have been offered the possibility of rehousing here locally but we feel it would be madness to take this option. That would involve setting up a new home for a matter of weeks before moving again a month later. We can't face that. And it would be totally unfair to our two small children.

There's so much to think about and so much to do - all because of a burst pipe. I expect though we're the lucky ones. I'm sure there may have been some of our neighbours flooded that didn't have comprehensive insurance, or such generous families to help out. And as our plan was always to be moving from here in a few months there's less pressure on us to rebuild what was lost.

Tonight I'm a long way from those I love. I desperately miss my wife and children but I'm doing what fathers/husbands are supposed to do - look after my family. And so I'm here in West London doing that. My hope is that the various ends I need to tie up will be tied by Wednesday morning and I can go give my wife and the twins a great big hug.