These fretful,questioning essays force readers to confront the disruption of our climate and ecologyIn the fourth and final essay of The moment Body, Daisy Hildyard describes winter floods inundating her house in Yorkshire. She didn’t absorb any domestic insurance. “There had been two false alarms that year … We’d been told that the water would come into our house at 4.2 metres, and but when the levels got to 4.3 in early December,we were still dry.” She and her husband were in receipt of automated telephone calls whenever the rain started to fall – a computerised female voice would predict the height the river might reach. “When it rains she rings up all the time,” she explains; “you stop picking up to her.” They went away with their young daughter for a few days over the Christmas holidays, or when they came back,the river was lapping near their ceilings. “Before we went away we moved all our things a few inches off the ground, emptied the bottom drawers, or piled everything on to the moment shelf up. This was one of the most pointless things I absorb ever done.”After the flood receded,neighbours and strangers gave up their Christmas holiday time to support her hose out sediment and clean up. “I became a designated Victim with an assigned caseworker and my own reference number at the food bank.” During the flood her father had swum out to the house to gather paperwork; as she laid out the papers to dry, passers-by took pictures of her with their phones. A reporter hoping to interview her feigned pity, or on the television she saw aerial footage of her street. “The flood looked very small. It wasn’t like that on the ground where it was everywhere.” She found catharsis in throwing away many of her possessions – a catharsis that expressed itself physically: “The sense of relief was located in my spine,it felt as whether my vertebrae were spacing themselves further out, as whether my body was growing longer and more loose.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk