Blogathon 20/26: Wet

It has been the wettest January/February for 8 million years, or something like that. I know this is true, I heard it on the radio. Before Christmas we had snow, lots of snow. Then snowfall turned to rainfall and that turned to downpour. Since then things have occasionally let up to brief periods of heavy drizzle. We did have one day last week when it actually didn’t rain for 9 whole hours. And then it did. Heavily. Again. The upshot of all this wet stuff is the back lawn is no longer a lawn (though it is still out the back). It is now a huge piece of near-bare earth/mud which looks like Llanelli 1st XV have been training on it every day since mid-January. As the plan is to put the house on the market, the back needs to be sorted out because it’s a feature (well, the view beyond is). But the patio looks like it was built by Bob The Drunkard and the back lawn looks like it was seeded by a one-legged parrot with terminal colour-blindness. Neither of these things go down in the ‘positive feature’ column of the property-selling spreadsheet. And then, on top of these 2 not very minor issues, there’s the fact so much rain has fallen over the last 50 days and nights, it now has nowhere to go. It just hangs around on the ground getting deeper with every passing minute of the day and night. I’ve seen less surface water in a Vietnamese paddy field (true!). The field behind our house has a standing of surface water larger than the area of the pool in the local leisure centre and (probably) 3 times as deep. Marvellous. I’m thinking of buying a dinghy to sail to the shops. I think that’s the way forward.