BBC - Survivor and rescue worker, Mississippi

Today I went to a notary where we signed my 87-year-old Dad's home over to me. He is going to stay in an excellent care home and I am going to bleed from multiple financial wounds for this, but it is worth it. It's a spacious 8-room house outside a town in the North, sort of our Lake District but without the hills. Clean, green and wet. Swimming and yachting in summer, skating in winter. All the stuff from my mother's and father's lives is in that house, their furniture, their old photographs, letters, right down tot the pots and pans, out of some of which I have eaten when I was a small kid. Now my kids are going to have the time of their life there, with a huge garden to play football and an equallt huge attic to hide from life's woes (I'll be hiding there from the mortgage collector occasionally).

So I imagined, for a moment, that all of that would be lost due to some natural disaster. It hardly bears thinking about. Which leaves me tongue-tied vis-a-vis such pictures. I would pray for them if I could, Dev Dave, but I am sure you will do so in my place.