Floods....again

It may be old news now, but the North of England has taken a frightful beating the last month or so. Three weeks ago, a “Storm of the Century” dropped 10cm of rain on the North of England in 18 hours causing the most widespread flooding the area had ever seen. A week before that, the same thing happened. Luckily for Brent’s parents, they missed the first of these storms … however, they caught the brunt of the second. This second storm struck just as Brent’s parents were for heading for London. There was a walk to the train station with full luggage in a driving gale, a cancelled train, a diversion to York and a 5 hour train ride where Brent’s Dad stood for the duration. Beth also dodged a crisis in Sheffield that day, where flooding caused evacuation of the train station and closures of many roads. For a grim while it looked as though she may have to spend the night in the Sheffield bus station. Luckily, a bus eventually appeared which was prepared to make the journey to Leeds. After leaving work at 3pm Beth finally made it home at 9pm.

All in all, we had it lucky. It seems a lot of people have family or friends who were devastated by the flooding. A good portion of the homes were without insurance and won’t be inhabitable for up to a year. There have been recent pictures on the news from Hull where the flooding still hasn’t subsided.

Even though we’ve been lucky, we still reserve the right to complain about the rain on a regular basis. Brent’s parent’s visit consisted of rain every single day for 21 days straight. Needless to say, they were not impressed with the weather. If they thought they had it bad, imagine how we feel…21 days of rain, try 45 weeks! Our first English summer has consisted of a steady diet of rain and temperatures never greater than 20C. We are well on our way to cultivating our stiff upper lip about it and the pictures on the news tell us that it could be much, much worse.

p.s. it is still raining! Apparently we will get another 50mm of rain today!