The skies are in high, high dudgeon. The wind howls like a deranged wolf; trees thrash wildly against the gale; debris pours from the grey sky, and stinging droplets of rain, like tiny bullets of ice, rattle against my cheeks.

And above all is the roar of a river desperate to break its banks.

It's just before seven last Saturday morning. Dawn's not yet broken but the houses are all in darkness. There were three green flashes in the sky over Hurworth and the power went out, not to return for 40 hours.

(According to the television weatherman, we "suffered an outage". A wattage? "A period or state in which electrical apparatus is not operating as a result of disconnection or failure," says the dictionary. It's an Americanism, first coined in 1903. Presumably, when re-connected, we are enjoying an inage.)

A flashing fire engine arrives with the RSPCA to rescue two horses paddling up to their knees in water; council lorries deliver sandbags, there's a gnawing in the pit of my stomach.

We were flooded in 1995, almost ten years to the day. The Tees filled up the cellar and coated everything with a gloopy, chocolate-brown, stinky, sludgy slurry.

But, by torchlight on the measuring pole, you can tell the river's no longer rising. In fact, it's probably falling. I relax and enjoy the storm.

A centuries-old tree, as big as a brontosaurus, comes speeding down the river three or four times faster than I can walk. Then it backs up, strangely against the current. Until the wind catches it. Forward it rushes, faster than before, twisting and churning as Croft bridge approaches; through it goes, like a child's toy in an industrial shredder, its hundreds of heavy limbs ripped off like plywood. It emerges, leaner and thinner like a canoe to shoot the rapids downstream.

People tell me of the storm's force around 5am, of walls vibrating, of roofs humming, of tall trees snapping with a blue flash shooting from their trunks. "Bright blue," says one lady, bemused at such a phenomenon.

My phone rings. It's 8.18am. It's a pre-recorded message from the Environment Agency. Get your family out. Get your valuables out. Move your livestock to higher ground. You're going to be flooded.

Even though the evidence for the last hour is that river has been falling, the gnawing returns to my stomach.

Our livestock consists of three fat ginger chickens who are so pampered and indolent that they don't bother laying eggs anymore. They live on the lowest of ground at the bottom of the garden. They are in imminent danger.

They refuse to budge. They look at me as if I were mad. Our feathers? On higher ground? In weather like this?

I shoo them out of the coop and they nip between my legs and back in. I shoo them out a second time, bolt the doors and carry them to higher ground.

A neighbour offers me a methylated spirits burner to boil a cup of tea. Seeing I'm distracted, the chickens scuttle back to lower ground. They queue, damp and squat, beside their door, unaware of the impending inundation.

It never comes. In fact, at 11.45am the sun bursts forth from a brilliant blue sky. The waters fall, the gnawing lifts from my stomach.

But in the drama of the day, and in the darkness of the outage, we never managed to deliver our share of coffee morning and tabletop sale leaflets.

So it's today, 10am, Croft village hall. Proceeds to the tsunami fund.