The New Year has brought Weather with a capital W – and we have been luckier here than people on the Levels, who were awash in January. We didn’t escape lightly, though. The spectacular hailstorm that struck on 3 January, with stones the size of gobstoppers (see picture on page 18), did a great deal of damage, and I understand that loss adjusters have been run off their feet. The plastic roof of my conservatory was punched through as if by machine-gun fire, and the boggy area at the bottom of my garden is now a swiftly flowing stream!