I f ever you come to our house, and you are very welcome – bed and breakfast, en suite, reasonable rates – you will discover that our back yard slopes down to our house, that there are buildings on two sides of the slope and the house is at the bottom.

If I tidied our kitchen table up and let you in you would also discover that it is a typically large farmhouse kitchen, and that you need to go down three steps from the kitchen to the rest of the house.

Earlier this week we had the mother and father of all thunderstorms. I was putting a machine on a tractor to go thistle cutting and took shelter in an adjacent building.

It was raining so hard it was quite spectacular but after a quarter of an hour, I decided I would be as well off in the house and do a bit of writing.

I didn't have a coat with me so the 50-yard dash would have soaked me to the skin but the Discovery was sheltering in the shed with me, so I took that to get to the house.

I'd never seen so much water going down the back yard and you could see that although the drain wasn't blocked, it just couldn't cope and he water was rising at the kitchen door.

There was already an inch of water in the kitchen when I opened the door. I've always thought of myself as resourceful, so I went straight to the airing cupboard and got out some blankets.

I put one against the door that leads to our living room, where the water was now starting to accumulate, one at the top of the steps to stop the waterfall that was gathering pace and then tried to brush some water back out of the door.

This was a complete waste of time so I put the third blanket across the bottom of the door and with two feet and the broom head, managed to keep it in place and stood there for half an hour.

I did open the door a fraction to see what was happening but the water was six inches above the doorstep. Eventually the storm abated and I was able to clear what was now three inches of water back out through the door. It took me two hours of sweeping and mopping to restore order.

My wife was out during this drama and when she returned home the kitchen was fairly clean, I had lit the Rayburn to speed up the drying process (always a plus where my wife is concerned). Most important of all, I had stopped the deluge flooding the rest of the house.

A few years ago we had a similar experience but there were no heroes on hand to save the day. Our living/dining room was flooded.

We worked hard shampooing the carpet and hired dehumidifiers and thought we'd done a good job but three days later the carpet started to stink.

If ever you see flood victims on television waiting for new carpets and fittings, don't be tempted to think they are trying it on because the filth and smell left by a flood is appalling.

Personally, my own heroic efforts went largely unheralded and I felt a bit like the little Dutch boy who saved the community by putting his finger in the dyke, but without the recognition.

My next door neighbour, who knows everything, and certainly more than is good for him, reckons we had an inch and a quarter of rain in 40 minutes, most of which came down our back yard.

I am in receipt of correspondence from West Country Life readers, for which I am extremely grateful, on the subject of moles. In particular, the control of moles in lawns.

Well, on a never-to-be-forgotten Sunday a couple of weeks ago I caught two, one an hour after I laid the trap. One was still alive; the trap had caught him by his leg. I had some difficulty deciding what to do with him.

You have to have some admiration for these little animals and how they live their lives, I just wish they would do it somewhere else.

I don't mind trapping them and killing them, I just prefer it to be out of sight down the burrow.

I told my daughter I'd put it in a bucket of water. "That won't do, moles are good swimmers," she said. Not with a mole trap on their leg, they're not.

I went off to the East Midlands yesterday to buy some cows. We would much prefer to run a self-contained herd here but over several years now, Nature has failed to send us the 50/50 proportion of bull calves to heifer claves that would achieve this and in a proportion that we have come to expect.

As it happens, they had lots of heifers born on the farm where the sale was and lots of pairs of twin heifer calves were sold together – which would suggest that Nature had indeed sent heifers along in the correct proportion, she just hadn't shared them out fairly.

Farming life is full of ironies because the year you have to go out to buy stock, the prices are through the roof.

We should be OK for heifers next year and the year after – I bet we won't have the satisfaction of working out how much money we've saved because I bet by then prices will be on the floor.

I bought six cows yesterday. I needed 10 but most of them were a couple of hundred pounds more than I was prepared to pay. They aren't home yet because the haulier will bring them because, here's another irony, you aren't allowed to transport your own stock more than 40 kilometres unless you go and pass some hauliers' certificate. Never mind if you've been transporting stock safely for more years than you care to remember.

I don't think the test is very onerous, I know many people who have passed it, none who've failed – after all there's only so many ways you can put a ramp down and confine stock so that they have to go in to the trailer.

So I know I could pass the test but (and I bet you've already guessed this) you have to pay for the test; surprise surprise. I bet the examiner wears a yellow jacket.