Mother of all thunderstorms

This Spring, I have counted 136 different types of weather inside of 24 hours

Mark Twain might very well have been talking about the UK this week when he said the above. One minute we’re basking in gorgeous sunshine, then overnight it  looks like it’s the End of Days. A friend of mine is a BBC meteorologist and she said she had never seen lightening strikes like those of Monday night into Tuesday morning – 50,000 strikes across the country in the space of a night. Another friend was trying to drive back from the Midlands and kept being diverted away from flooded motorways.

I’m never so grateful for living at the top of a hill, as I am when the rains come and stay and the rivers and the antiquated Victorian drainage systems fail to cope. But then when Birmingham reports that a month’s rainfall fell in the space of an hour, causing flash floods barely two years after the last big floods, it’s a wonder that anything can cope. Of course it’s not just the drains that are having trouble coping with excessive water flow – sink holes are opening up all over the place because the layers underneath are subsiding and getting washed into wherever it is this stuff goes.

Take this beauty that’s on my way to work, for example.

Or this from people trying to access the station platform.

The trouble is, local councils and even the Highways Agency are all suffering from reduced budgets. How many potholes are going to be ‘sort-of’ fixed, with a bit of tarmac and the heel of a steel-toe capped boot instead of properly because there’s only so much that can be done with all this extra work.

So, mot so much End of days, as Same-old Same-old, really.