Fixing flooding over breakfast

The atrocious weather of just a week ago brought home the pressing need to come up with an economic and effective way to prevent flooding.

Fear not – I have a solution!

To say it was a bit damp last weekend would be an understatement similar in magnitude to me saying I’m receding a teensy bit.

So heavy was the rain that it wouldn’t have been a surprise to hear a report of otters calling it a day and heading for somewhere dry indoors, preferably with under-floor heating.

Whilst many people and their homes were affected, it appears that overall we had a very near miss, with towns such as Kendal escaping serious flooding by a matter of a few watery inches.

Although it seems we are temporarily through with the intense liquid onslaught, the now waterlogged ground once again leaves us at the mercy of any impending low pressure wandering into the area with prolonged downpours on it’s cloudy mind.

In an attempt to try and come up with a solution to this problem, I had a brainstorming session with some of the finest minds available in my office that hold 3 people, whilst eating mince pies (it is vitally important that you feed ideas with seasonal snacks).

Us all being experts in our respective fields (Marketing, IT and Health & Safety) didn’t help as much as you might think, and we were facing not only failure, but some very small, depressingly empty, foil dishes, when the answer came to us in a sticky-fingered sugar-rush: Weetabix.

You know – the oblong, wheaty, breakfast cereal generally detested by children for being a bit dull and flavourless, and consumed by adults who have concluded it’s probably about time they stopped having Coco-Pops when they’re past 30.

Anyone familiar with these breakfast bricks will know all about how good they are for you, but also that they are TARDIS-like when it comes to milk, being able to absorb a volume of cow-juice larger than themselves, then come back for more like a dehydrated cat.

Scientific tests (I once owned a lab coat, so that counts, right?) have proven without doubt that own-brand supermarket WheatyBisks can see off a whole glass of milk, but the original, poorly-spelt, Weetabix can slurp up a pint or more.

The solution to flooding problems is simple then – buy a load of them, then stack them up along riverbanks, the edge of lakes and that road you always get held up on every time it rains hard. I’ve done some calculations, and I reckon about 25 boxes should be enough.

If you’ve got any left over afterwards, you can always liven them up with custard on at breakfast time, or use one to sand the skirting boards next time you’re decorating.

Got to go – the Environment Agency and the manufacturers of Silica Gel are pretty annoyed with me for some reason...

Next Week: How to solve the nuclear waste storage problem using Rice Crispies.

This post might have first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 20th of November 2015. The reason for my doubt is threefold:

1) No sign of it on their website
2) No print edition has arrived in the post
3) It was one of my less sane offerings, so it's possible it never made it at all

I'm assuming they would have let me know if 3 were the case, but maybe they're just hoping I won't notice. If anyone spotted it, please do Tweet me at @grumpyf1.

We honestly did have the conversation in the office, by the way. Today I actually choked on coffee whilst laughing at a something. I like coffee, but breathing it in isn't recommended.

Mad stats on this blog in the past few days: 300-400+. No idea why, and they're almost exclusively from the States. Bless ya!

(CD-based musicality emanating forth from the cheap Hi-Fi tonight: "The Symphonic Jean Michel Jarre". Rousing.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog