'TWAS the week before Christmas, and the house stirred to the sounds of the last-day-at-school breakfast. Party food, gifts and cards all being readied to carry into class.

There's a sharp rap on the door. Postman. Can only mean more presents. My five-year-old daughter rushes excitedly to see.

Propped up against the door, the postman has left a tall white card envelope. The hopes are up - this is the best kind of gift, a free one, an unexpected one.

We tear open the envelope and inside is a 2004 calendar. How nice. There are pretty river scenes for every month. How thoughtful.

But the rivers are in various stages of flood. Look, February - there's a park bench with dirty floodwater sloshing around its legs.

Hey, March - there's a country cottage under a foot of filthy floodwater with a picturesque pair of swans preening outside the front door.

Get a look at November - a golden sunset reflecting prettily across a couple of fields of stinking floodwater caused by the River Derwent in full flow in 2001. How nice.

The calendar has been sent to us by the Environment Agency which has identified that we are at risk of flooding. It tells us we are one of 255,000 homes and businesses in the North-East that may go under any day now.

As if we didn't already know. Nine years ago, the Tees burst its banks and filled up our cellar. My wife had to get a dinghy to the front door.

The waters stopped just two steps short of the dining room floor that I'd spent a week sanding down. When they retreated, they left inches of stinking sludge, slurry and snail shells caked on to the walls and floor.

We were lucky. Indeed, if you look at March you can see how lucky. For behind the swans preening you can see all the homeowners' worldly possessions piled up against the windows in a desperate bid to prevent them from being destroyed.

Nevertheless, the calendar tells us what sirens and loudspeakers to listen out for as the waters rise. It tells us what to do when the flooding starts and how we can limit the damage when the water cascades into our home, washes away our Christmas tree and reduces the overdraft-worth of presents to a soggy mess of wrapping paper on top of a ruined carpet.

Thanks. What to do after a flood, says the calendar helpfully. "Every year flood damage costs millions of pounds. It will take a long time before you can get your life back to normal following a flood."

Very festive. Very cheery. The sort of thing that really warms the cockles of your heart in this season of goodwill.

Eight years on from our flood, I still take an obsessive interest in weather forecasts - the predictions of snow for tomorrow may be great fun for everyone else who is a child at heart, but I know that after the snow comes the thaw comes the flood. It's what did for us last time.

But at least at the back of the calendar there's a Kid's Corner. It has a colour-in drawing of Inspector Downpaw, who is a cat in a sou'wester getting drenched by cats and dogs that are raining out of the sky. Strangely, my daughter prefers to colour Rudolph's nose bright red in her Christmas colouring book.

This is one present that has put a real dampener on the week before Christmas.