A HAPPY START TO THE NEW YEAR

NEW YEAR FIREWORKS FOLLOWED BY STORMS

New Year arrived with pomp and ceremony as the grand London fireworks vied with global sparklers throughout the night, under clear blue skies everywhere.  Alas! this brief respite was not a forerunner of good weather in the United Kingdom, as storms of heavy rainfall and 100 mph winds, vindicate our good wishes.


Our little kingdom of Britain had been battered by strong winds, rain and turbulent seas, continuously for two months, the wildest and windiest weather recorded in decades, a situation never faced before, in my 49 years of living in England.  There had been the occasional flooding here and there, when rainfall was exceptionally heavy, as in 2003 or 2007, but never had the ground saturation been so sodden for so long.

A mirage of tranquility

You would be forgiven to think these homes were built with exotic water features around them, but the serenity belies the turmoil faced by residents, imprisoned in their own home with no clean drinking water and no way to launder their clothes or flush their toilets.  Many had found their homes contaminated by sewage, and the flood water is posing health hazards to children and pets, if swallowed, as many areas had tested positive with fecal bacteria.

Unrelenting waves bashing Cornwall  

Everyday we hear reports of more disasters: rivers overflowing into flood plains; unprecedented flooding in towns and cities, like Winchester, Capital of Hampshire, being sandbagged to divert flood water from city centre businesses; uprooted trees landing on cars; rooftops lifting or borne away by high winds; railway lines crumbling under incessant rain and 100 mph wind swiping at everything in its path.

Paul Daniel and wife waded outdoors

Roads, bridges and river banks are collapsing under ferocious on-shore waves; electricity lines destroyed by storms are cutting off power to tens of thousands of homes, some of whom had been without any fuel since before Christmas and had to dispose of food languishing in fridges and freezers.  Many households had to abandon their flooded homes, inhabitable due to sewage seeping up the floorboards, or becoming inaccessible except by boats or wading through waist-high water levels.

Romsey bandstand reflected by flood

There is no sign what-so-ever of the flood water receding from our saturated landscape, as the Met office warned of more devastation on the way: wind gusting over 80 mph, with heavier downpour throughout the night and possibility of snow on some high ground.  Already Hambledon had been under water for 40 days and nights, Datchet near Windsor had been flooded since early January, and Jenny, Roy's sister, living in Romsey, was house-bound for a few days last month, due to flooding.

Firefighters ferrying victims

The Government is finally deploying the army to shore up flood defences up and down the country, joining forces with the fire fighters, volunteers, and hundreds of employees of the Environment Agency distributing sandbags and helping vulnerable homes to seal off flooding wherever possible.  The endurance and strength of our British flood victims deserve our admiration and full support from the Government for any help and funding required.

We wish them greater resilience in the face of so much atrocity dealt them by Nature, Global warming and Climate Change, and to a great extent, exacerbated by ill-conceived EU directives to our Environment Agency, not to dredge the many rivers that had, for centuries, been the lifeblood of Britain's infrastructure in carrying away glacial and rainwater to the sea, and supplying many counties the means for fishing, farming, irrigation, sport and navigation.

This is another example of EU blundering by autocratic officials, ensconced in their urban ivory-tower in Brussels, unfamiliar with Britain's climate and geology, and ignorant of the millennia of indigenous good practice in river management, that had balanced the usefulness of our waterways with a high degree of nature reserves required for British birds, fishery and game, that already proliferate in our green and pleasant land.

Too much tampering by too many over-paid and under-employed EU agencies from across the Channel, are destroying quality of British life that had evolved through diligent study of our own environment. Who could better administrate our rivers than our own local homegrown, resident landowners, farmers and businesses?  Just a small local environment agency in each county would surely be better than a massive, national one, located in London, but directed by distant EU mis-informed officials.

In spite of the atrocious weather, I wish you all a happy Chinese New Year of the Horse, giving you strength and sense of purpose in everything you do and whatever life throws at you.
Happy St. Valentine's Day!

I shall speak to you again soon.