A flood and Other Minor Catastrophes

Date: 1/28/2026

My husband and I only come in for our weekly foodshop at our local Aldi. Milk. Bread. Something beige and lazily assembled for our dinner. Something that promises sustenance minus the headache, the mess, and a night spent hunched over the washing up bowl. But now we’ve been flooded in. The weather is relentless, thrashing itself against the glass like a feral animal that’s found its own reflection and taken offence. Rain flings itself sideways. Wind claws at the doors. Customers gasp in horror, mouths wide open in despair — a shoal of startled koi in rain macs. “Oh my God,” a woman whispers dramatically, clutching a sourdough like it's her one remaining hope, as if carbs might save her soul. A man films the whole spectacle on his phone, narrating it in a hushed David Attenborough voice: “Here we see the wild Aldi shopper, wrestling a bag for life in its natural enemy: British weather — note the desperate spinning, the tragic loss of balance, the quiet dignity slipping away.” Their anxiety feeds into my own. It multiplies. Breeds. Sets up a small panic commune in my ribcage. I can hear them holding meetings. Electing a chairperson. Drafting a crisis plan. Possibly arguing over biscuits. I think of the boys we’ve left at home. What if we’re stuck in Aldi forever? What if they grow into feral teenagers raised entirely on Wi-Fi and Poptarts, telling bedtime stories about the parents who vanished between the cereal aisle and the frozen peas? Ambulances streak past the windows, blue lights slicing the dark sky like distant flares in a sinking world. Each one adds another invisible weight to my chest, another spark of catastrophising my mind can’t switch off. “We need to try to get home,” I say to Mat. “The boys will be worried.” “The boys,”he scoffs. “They’ll be on their games. They won’t even know we exist, let alone that we’ve been gone an hour.” “They might wonder where the snacks are,” I say weakly. He smirks. “Exactly. Five minutes of grief. Then back to gaming.” I sigh the long, theatrical sigh of a woman emotionally carrying the entire neighbourhood. The shop suddenly feels smaller. Claustrophobic. The water outside creeps higher and higher, licking bumpers, swallowing lamposts, erasing the polite logic of parking bays, rising above car level, drowning small trees in the process. People are literally swimming to their cars, faces pinched in disbelief and damp recognition. One bloke mounts his Ford Fiesta like he’s about to cross the English Channel, face set with heroic incompetence and misplaced faith in German engineering. A woman doggy-paddles past with a trolley full of discounted crisps like she’s fleeing a war zone — priorities intact, dignity sacrificed somewhere in the frozen section. Reality wobbles. And then the supermarket becomes a gym. I don’t know how. Perhaps the dream gods fancy a change of scenery. Either bored of baked goods, or nursing a quiet fetish for sweat and spandex, or simply scrolling the celestial equivalent of late-night television. They’ve gone big with it. A very loud, Instagram-famous personal trainer in figure-hugging lycra is screaming instructions like a drill sergeant raised entirely on protein shakes and unresolved rage. “COME ON YOU LARD ASS!” she bellows at a tubby man trembling heroically at the back, his face glazed with effort and quiet humiliation, sweat pouring off him like shame in liquid form. She whirls, spotting a woman mid-lunge. “KEEP UP, FLAT ASS! THAT BUTT AIN’T GONNA GROW ITSELF!” The tubby man, wildly misreading the moment, wheezes: “I… I don’t even want a butt…” “YOU WANT A FUTURE, DON’T YOU?” The woman freezes. Her face collapses. Her cheeks start to burn, and then she bolts for the exit sobbing, trainers squeaking, skidding on the tear-soaked floor, leaving a damp trail of wounded dignity behind her. Lycra woman cups her hands and shout after her: “TEARS AREN'T GOING TO BRING THOSE PANCAKES BACK TO LIFE, LOVE!” I flinch like she’s personally attacked me. “I need to get away from that screaming woman,” I say to Mat, who appears far too invested in ogling her glutes — the expression of a man mentally storing the imagery to his wankbank. “Hello,” I say, nudging him. “Earth to Mat.” Eventually he snaps out of whatever sweaty lycra fantasy he’s wandered into. “Sorry… I was just checking out the flooring. Something like that for the extension perhaps?” “Ah yes,” I say dryly. “The world-renowned Lycra-cladded ass flooring collection.” He grins unapologetically. “Do you think we can go home now?” I ask. We peer through the glass. The weather has escalated into something Old Testament. The car park has fully committed to its new career as an aquarium. I half expect a manta ray to glide past the trolley bay. “The boys will be fine,” Mat sighs. “You worry too much.” That’s when I realise I’m in my swimming costume. Not subtly, either. Full exposure. Pale thighs. Prickling shame. I have absolutely no idea how this has happened, but whoever’s manning the celestial CCTV tonight is clearly a perv — and not even a discreet one. “Oh for God’s sake,” I mutter. “Could you at least buy me dinner first?” “I’d better get changed,” I announce. Mat tosses me a key. It’s microscopic. A key for ants. A decorative sprinkle masquerading as metal. “What am I supposed to do with that?” I moan. I try the changing room door anyway. It disintegrates in my hands like a digestive biscuit having its own existential crisis, crumbling under the weight of responsibility. Ha. Very funny, universe. Swimming costume it is, then. “Wanna join in?” Lycra Woman yells, eyeing me like fresh prey. “No fucking chance,” I mutter. Head down, avoiding eye-contact. The scene swirls away like water down a plughole. Now I’m walking down the road past what used to be the old butchers. It’s been reinvented into a plant haven — greenery tumbling everywhere, leaves brushing the windows like curious hands, pots stacked like a jungle gone rogue, nature staging a gentle coup, patiently reclaiming its square footage. Naturally, I’m drawn to it. I love a plant. Plants don’t lie. They just quietly die when you neglect them, which feels refreshingly honest. Except these ones are already dying. Wilted. Yellowed. Shrivelled. Even the cacti have collapsed into sad little raisins, like they’ve given up on photosynthesis entirely. They look like they haven’t been watered in months. Potentially years. An itch crawls inside me. A pull. A responsibility reflex. I want to water them. Save them. Resurrect them like some sort of anxious horticultural messiah. “You can’t fix everything,” Mat says, gently but firmly. In the distance, two twin women are having a full-scale screaming match in the middle of the road. Finger-pointing. Hair flying. Reality-TV-levels of drama. We stand watching like it’s a box set we didn’t mean to binge but now emotionally cannot abandon. And then, because dreams have no shame, Amanda Holden appears and breaks them up. Of course she does. Her face gets everywhere, scavenging for every crumb of fame, like a glamorous rash you can’t quite get rid of. “Girls! Control yourselves!” she snaps. “You’re embarrassing yourselves.” Too right. “You look a bit like Amanda Holden,” Mat says. I loathe that woman — but she is annoyingly hot — so I accept the compliment and wear it like a borrowed crown, slightly crooked, slightly undeserved, aware it could slip at any moment. I look back at the wilted plants, wishing I could save them. If only I could summon a magic watering can. Sprinkle a little love on them. The dream gods, as always, misinterpret my tone. Whoosh. A tsunami barrels down the hill like divine intervention. We’re ripped off our feet instantly. I catch fragments as we’re swept along. Mat clinging to a lamppost, knuckles white, face doing that brave-but-terrified thing. The twins gripping each other like shipwrecked survivors. A waterlogged Amanda Holden curled up on a man’s head like a desperate drowned rat. The old butchers now an aquarium, plants finally fed but drowning in their abundance. And inside me, something opens. Not breaks — opens. A quiet dam gives way, not in violence but in surrender. The constant reaching, fixing, bracing, clinging. The quiet conviction that if I loosen my grip, the world will unravel. The weary myth that love is measured in control. The private arrogance of the universe depends on me. The water carries me anyway. Cold. Brutal. Unarguable. For once, I stop trying to steer the current. I let myself float inside it — weightless, ridiculous, fleetingly inconsequential. The world keeps moving. The plants drink. The storm exhausts itself. The boys keep gaming. Mat keeps surviving. Amanda Holden clings to strangers like a glamorous barnacle. And I drift — not drowning, not saving — just being carried, exactly as I am, small inside something vast, finally willing to trust the tide, finally willing to be held instead of holding everything else.