English summer

[shewhomust]

This isn't a post about being flooded; if anything, it's a post about not being flooded, about being in that part of the country in which a wet summer has not amounted to flooding. Any smugness there might have been about this situation (because it's some consolation to those of us who live at the top of a long hill that at least we needn't fear flooding) vanished as the news came in of water supplies being cut off, and power stations closed down. But this isn't the post about greedy developers building in floodplains and leaving everyone else to sort out the mess: it's just a mildly bemused meditation on an English summer.

So here's a picture of the rain bucketing down through the roof of the Central Station in Newcastle, a short sharp shock which ended as bruptly as it began, so that when I returned home an hour or so later, there was no trace left of the pool it had created on the station floor. Likewise the very sudden shower that caught us the following day, and lasted for maybe fifteen minutes: we were able to stroll to a restaurant after Gail's ghost stories as if there were no such thing as rain.

The following weekend was grey enough that we deferred going walking until the Monday, when we went down to Bishop Middleham to tick off a few more squares; the village is on a hillside, and behind it extends a spur of hill, where a rather bumpy field is all that remains of a fortified manor house which belonged to the Bishop of Durham in the middle ages. So that's another for the "We've lived here all these years and never seen that before!" file. At the foot of the slope, a patch of land has been made into a wildlife garden, with wooden walkways over the pools that gather there - except that this year there are no pools and you can walk there dryshod. We met a gardener who complained of the lack of rain this summer, compared to last.

Last Saturday we went to York, to celebrate fjm's birthday with a picnic. When she first suggested it, it sounded a brilliant idea, then, as the date grew nearer and grey weekend followed grey weekend, I began to be nervous. I should have had more faith; it was a lovely day. durham_rambler and I drove down with desperance, and we all gathered in the Museum Gardens, near the ruined abbey, under a tree because it was sunny enough that shade was desirable. There was eating and drinking and relaxation and much conversation, with fjm and chilperic, and vin_petrol (whose handle made me think of valydiarosada, obviously), and several other people who do not have LJs. One of them had the excuse of being only nine weeks old, but I really don't know what the others can be thinking... We talked of books, and whether you could make moonshine cheese (and if so, whether you could make blue moonshine cheese) and Orkney (because the parents of our youngest member are planning to escape there) and books and Lincoln and Librarything... Although York sits in low land between two rivers, there has been no sign of flooding, unlike the great floods it suffered in 2000. And although the sun occasionally vanished into cloud, it always came back, the threatened showers never quite materialised and it was the hardness of the ground that eventually drove us into the theatre bar.

Yesterday, there was more walking on a brilliantly sunny day, with occasional grey clouds which did not quite produce showers. And in the evening we dined with a friend in Shincliffe, and reminisced about the floods of a couple of years ago, when the Wear flooded and the road between Shincliffe and the city was closed. This year, there has been some flash flooding, but nothing on that scale, and the Wear, though it is running as high in July as it usually does in winter, shows no signs of bursting its banks.

It would be tempting fate to pursue this theme further, I think.