It has been a quiet week in terms of house activity, which gives me time to reflect on events of the previous few weeks. More specifically, it gives me time to consider the great stop cock flood of 2007 and pass on the lessons learned.

The best advice I can give to absolutely everyone living in a property with water, gas, and electricity supplies is this: make sure that you know where and how to switch off each of these services. Your water supply should have an indoor stop cock (usually beneath the sink) and an outdoor isolation point (somewhere in the street, perhaps with your water meter). Gas supplies will have a master isolation point (often in with the gas meter, external to the house) that can shut off the supply with the turn of a handle. Modern homes have an electricity circuit breaker panel (ours is in a downstairs cupboard) with a large main switch that can turn off the electricity supply to your entire house.

My second piece of advice is: have contact numbers for emergency plumbers, electricians, etc. programmed into your phones. When the water is literally gushing into your house from a broken stop cock, the last thing you want to be doing is hunting around for a phone number. Believe me; I know what I am talking about here.

My final advice is: don’t tell teenagers any of this. If they knew that they could switch off the water and gas supply to any house by a few readily accessible outdoor valves, then we would be in a world of trouble.