We awoke this morning to find the drive and several of the flower beds with puddles of standing water. Nothing like as bad as the floods of 2007, but at least then it had been raining! We don’t seem to have had that much rain so far this year and if it did rain last night I never heard it.

The floods of 2007 happened on the 25th of June, I remember because it’s Peter’s birthday. It just poured down all day. By the time it had finished, the drive was a boggy mess, causing the postman to get his feet wet.

The flower beds were like swimming pools and the field had several small lakes in it. Funnily enough, we had intended to have a big pond in the field, but never got round to making it. This gave us an idea of what it would have looked like.

What can you do in a situation like that. Not a lot really, just hope it drains away quickly and doesn’t kill any plants. We were luckier than most, but it was still a mess.
It took several days to go and we lost one or two plants who simply couldn’t stand having their roots immersed in water for so long. One of these was a lovely clematis montana that grew up the front of the house, but as I say we were lucky, some people lost everything and some even lost their lives.

Since then even the slightest bit of rain seems to have a disproportionate effect, like this morning for example. It’s been cold damp and miserable these last few weeks but we’ve hardly had excessive rain fall. A walk up the lane a few days ago revealed similar problems in other peoples gardens, huge amounts of standing water, the like of which we haven’t seen in our 10 years here.

Having said that, in the south of England they really have had problems. A months’ worth of rain has just fallen in 24 hrs, and that on top of all the snow they’ve had, many places are flooded quite badly. Contrast all this with what’s happening in Australia at the moment. Those forest fires look like a nightmare of Hell. My heart goes out to those poor people.

When I was a small child I always remember something my mum once said. “Floods and fires end the world”. I have know idea why she said it, or indeed what context it was said in, but as a small child I found it scary and remember it to this day, some 50 years later. I hope she was wrong.