Heavy weather causes brain fade

It rained a fair bit last week.

You may have noticed that, as water coursed through your lounge, or you started wondering whether you should have continued with that ark you started in ‘O’ Level Woodwork.

Just up the road from me (I say road – canal might have been more appropriate) Levens Hall registered 99mm of rain in 48 hours. That’s about 4 inches in old money, or ‘Blimey! Really?’ when translated into Southern England-ish.

As the Lake District rapidly gained a significant number of extra water features, the rain caused various levels of moist hell for homeowners, pedestrians, motorists and anyone else unlucky enough to have to go out in it. And also for quite a lot who’d stayed in hoping to avoid it, only to find it had broken into their homes, and was busy doing an unwelcome liquidious jig, and generally making a nuisance of itself, in their carpets and soft furnishings.

A well know company that supplies water (try not to laugh too much) is currently busy in our little village. They’re doing some essential works, and making one hell of a, controlled, mess whilst they lay new pipes and put concrete chambers in all over the place that would generally only been seen when Kevin McLeod was being particularly smug about a Grand Design.

As part of this, they created a large depot to bung all their diggery-pokery stuff, spare pipes, portacabins, and to provide a place for sturdy chaps in reflective jackets to park their vans. Although they placed a considerable depth of stone on top of the field first, Mother Nature laughed heartily and sent forth enough rain to leave it temporarily under water.

Sadly, the moisture must have got into the heads of the burly fellows through their yellow hard hats as, unable to get into their site, they parked on the road right outside it, and stood around looking a bit confused.

As their site is on a road by the station, where commuters park, wise people had sections of double yellow lines painted at regular intervals, so motorists passing the parked cars can pull in, letting those coming the other way get past - except on that day, as stout reflective men filled up all the double yellow sections with their vans, then stood and watched the ensuing traffic chaos like sheep do when a train goes past. Uncomprehendingly.

After much reversing, waving at other motorists and general growling, we got through, helped in the most miniscule of ways by one of the shiny yellow flock, who eventually stepped into the road after we’d managed to figure it out for ourselves, and waved us past.

The only ray of sunshine to this soggy tale is that my polite rant on twitter was answered swiftly by the company in question, who promised to speak to those concerned. Now all we have to do is wait for the next biblical rain event to see if it worked. Shouldn’t take long, then...

Have a sensibly parked weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 5th October 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here I seem to have cracked the tough nut that was getting my title for the article used. It turns out that I just have to, very literally, sum up the content of the piece with a vaguely witty title. Who knew? Mind you, my original title was going to be 'United Futilities' (which NW of England water users will get) but I assumed it wouldn't get used. It might still result in reflective-clad men fiddling with my stopcock, but that's one of perils of amateur journalism, I guess...

99 words went missing this week. You've got all of them here. Sorry.

As postscript to this story, the works have resulted in Arnside Pier being closed, from the start of September, whilst the water company sliced through it to lay hoofing pipes. 3 weeks was the intention, but it's still closed. Their nicely printed sign has been crudely drawn over in marker pen, changing the 3 to a 5, then and 8, and now a 9. That's a pretty substantial over-run, and a pretty big kick in the nuts for a village's shops to cope with during a recession. I'm guessing they'll blame the weather.

(Music today by Alanis Morissette, from her MTV Unplugged album from the tail end of the last century.)

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