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That’s what he does in that barn of his: he builds things out of wood. I suppose it fits, with his having been an engineer. ‘What kind of things do you make?’ I wanted to know, but he didn’t give me much of an answer. He just gazed towards the window absently and rubbed his beard. ‘Whatever’s required.’
    He’s filled the box with clean, dry leaves and it looks extremely cosy. Enlil and Ninlil, I’ve noticed, give it a wide berth; they stalk past at the far side of the kitchen, the tips of their tails twitching. This morning the fox was asleep, his eyes two tight black slits, although his whiskers flickered when I moved close by with my duster. And when I looked again his eyes were open and fixed on me without blinking, a hard, glassy orange the same colour as his coat.
    â€˜Tough little fellow, isn’t he?’ I said when we sat down to our elevenses. ‘To have come through all that and survived.’
    â€˜This time,’ said Mr Napish.
    It’s one of his pet themes, and not a very cheerful one, I must say. Just because we’ve had one tidal flood doesn’t mean that’s an end to it; there’ll be more to come, he insists, and worse. When he worked in coastal defence, he told me, they used to call it The Big One , like they do in that place where they get all the earthquakes – Japan, did he say, or California?
    I must have been looking a bit cast down because he caught my eye, then, and seemed to soften. ‘There’s certainly some spirit in him. Animals have a tenacious instinct for life. There will always be those that survive.’
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    Well, that’s Christmas and the New Year come and gone, and still no sign of any winter weather. Nothing I’d think of as winter, anyway: you expect it to be sparkling cold at Christmas, don’t you? No snow, no ice, and scarcely a frost to speak of so far, though we’re well into January. Instead, it’s been unseasonably mild with week after week of leaden skies. So dampening to the spirits when it’s grey at this time of year, I always think. The days are short enough anyway, and when it’s dull and overcast it feels as if the sun’s never properly got up at all. I need the lights on to see what I’m dusting, even at midday.
    And rain – it seems to have been non-stop. I can hardly remember a morning when I haven’t woken up to the sound of water splattering down from the corner of the outhouse roof and onto the coal bunker. I must remember to get that gutter fixed. There’s water standing round the lanes in places where I’ve never known them flood before, and all the fields are waterlogged. They were talking about it on the radio: how usually you’d think of rain in January as good for the winter wheat, but how this year the soil’s so wet that the plants are starved of oxygen. One farmer said that half his crop had rotted.
    It’s a trial for the livestock, too. Mr Willett’s cows are gone from his big meadow. I heard he’s having to pay for grazing for them over Framlingham way because he’s no fields here that aren’t half under water. And I saw Joe Wakeling’s daughter’s donkey the morning after a recent storm with filth up to its hocks, marooned on a tiny island of grass in its submerged paddock. The poor thing was too scared, Joe said, for them to lead it through the water and bring it under cover. They just had to leave it there to take its chances, and now it’s lame with the mud fever – and little wonder, poor creature.
    The tidewater along the Alde has fallen back some way at least since the night of the surge, but it’s left behind a patchwork of small lakes and cut-offs. In places the river is still far wider than it should be, while in others, where it’s back between its banks, it’s swollen and churning like a pan on the boil and nothing like its familiar, lazy green self. The