ALO PRESIDENTA

As president of our community I speculate on my demanding role in all this. Take the deluge upon us during the storm the other night. I ordered Mr van de Ven to do all the physical work, waking up neighbours to find the source of the overflow while I dealt with communications which didn't quite go to plan. One only needs to put a vowel or a consonant in the wrong place for disorder and misunderstanding. In my attempts to describe to the administrator on the phone what kind of water was raining down on the neighbourhood I replaced the letter p with the letter b, so instead of a tromba (a torrent) of water I told her it was a trompa, which can translate as an elephant's trunk or a French horn, take your pick. It got worse when I tried to explain that we thought the water was getting stuck in the guttering, not a word I often use in any language but the poor woman didn't know what to say when I told her this water was increasing in the canelones ( culinary dish from Italy) when I should have said canalones. The next day I got a phone call from the man who does the guttering asking me how he could climb onto the roof to sort it all out. As president I went all judicious on him telling him it was too dangerous to go climbing across roofs but five minutes later that is what he did, over my neighbour Nadine's balcony, no harness, hard hat, scaffolding, just him and the elements and me watching him heart in mouth as he leaned over three floors up fishing out a cloth that had somehow got trapped blocking all the water. I am sure he did it just to be all macho and swashbuckling and now expects me to give him a medal.