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Well, I've just survived day one of no running water. I'm learning to live by the sun. To help matters the power went off at 6.30 am yesterday, Monday, 23 July, and didn't come on again till about midnight. I read rather a lot yesterday.
Someone fills the garden water butt as quickly as I empty it, so at least the loo gets flushed. Another couple of day and you will be able to smell us as the latest prognosis for running water is 7 - 14 days' time.
I would leave but I have an 86 year old father who is determined to stick it out WWII fashion. We both have places to go.
Now to see what today holds in store.
Hugs
Nigel
[Updated on: Tue, 24 July 2007 05:30]
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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saben
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On fire! |
Registered: May 2003
Messages: 1537
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Send some our way. Our water reserves are still low from the ongoing drought (and pushing water prices to a premium).
Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
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It's all yours, Saben. Take as much as you want.
Hugs
N
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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Ok, when you flush the toilet, whose garden does it pop up in?
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Zambezi
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Toe is in the water |
Location: Various (!)
Registered: January 2004
Messages: 40
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Mine, to judge from the speed that everything in the garden is growing this year. It's convenient, therefore, that my local refuse collectors are on strike and I have not had a garden waste collection for eight weeks.
If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving isn't for you.
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The water pops up in Saben's garden of course. That's who he said could take all the water he wanted. 
Let's see if British poo makes Australian flowers grow!
Youth crisis hot-line 866-488-7386, 24 hr (U.S.A.)
There are people who want to help you cope with being you.
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I have been away from the forum for a few days, so I only just saw this. I would like to commiserate with all you Englishmen suffering from a natural exuberance of rain water. It sounds awful. You might like to know that as I write this - not yet 7 am - the temperature outside is already 28°C and the plants in my window are dripping with humidity. We haven't seen any rain since late March. Do a swap?
J F R
[Updated on: Wed, 25 July 2007 03:59]
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)
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Zambezi
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Toe is in the water |
Location: Various (!)
Registered: January 2004
Messages: 40
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With nothing better to do this afternoon I wondered on over to the BBC website to check on the flooding situation (nothing to do with Schadenfreude - I have many close friends and family at risk.) In the pages of "Have Your Say" there is a curious debate raging. One of the subjects is called something like "How have the floods affected you," and the other "Should we continue to build on flood plains?" Both appear to have been hijacked by Daily Mail readers.
For those not aware, Britain is desperately short of housing, particularly in the south east of England (around London, for that is where all the jobs are). All the evidence points to the fact that demand for homes is rising not because of population increases but because of the rate of single-occupancy household creation - young people living by themselves rather than moving straight from the parental home to the marital home, high divorce rates, etc. In the meantime old people are not dying as fast as they used to and many single elderly people are hogging large former family homes, trapping young families in unsuitable homes. Because of weird planning laws and the desire of Brits to live in low-rise individual houses ("shoeboxes") with tiny gardens we have what is claimed to be a shortage of land to build new homes. To alleviate the problem, government has made it clear that it wants new homes built in areas where they are needed (so far, fair enough), hence the debate about using flood plains.
To read the level of debate over at the Beeb you would think that Britain's current housing and flooding problems are, in fact, one and the same and have somehow both been caused by immigration (of the type that come from Bulgaria to scrub toilets for a living to send money home, and therefore sleep ten to a room in shifts. There are comments like "WE'RE TOO WET AND WE'RE FULL! Send all the foreigners home and we won't need to build new homes on floodplains."
It got me worried, for I am an immigrant. So I did a bit of googling and back-of-envelope number crunching and came up with the following. The United Kingdom has a population density of about 250 souls per square kilometre, comfortably below places like Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea and, closer to home, the Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, and the Lebanon. Average annual rainfall in the UK varies widely: up to about 2000mm per year in the Lake District, although virtually nobody lives there. In the Midlands and the South East of England rainfall averages at about 700mm a year.
For various reasons I know a bit about Hong Kong (whose housing and infrastructure programmes used to be run by Brits, in case anyone has forgotten). Hong Kong has a population density of 6400 per sq km and averages 2200mm of rain per year, nearly all of which comes in intense torrential downpours of the "unforseeable" type we saw last Friday.
Household flooding is almost unheard of there. The idea that a street, let alone an entire district, might be underwater for a few days would have you laughed out of the room there. You can drive two double-decker buses side by side through the new ( 1998 ) main trunk sewer on Hong Kong Island. It doesn't need to be that big: it just is - "just in case".
Ah, you say, but the UK figures mask wide variations in population density. In England (rather than the whole UK) there are 383 people per sq km and it's actually 4700 per sq km across London and as high as 13300 per sq km in some of the very densely populated boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea. True, but less than 20% of Hong Kong's land area is built upon too. In most urban districts there population density varies from 35,000 to as much as 80,000 per sq km, peaking at a whopping 165,000 people per square kilometre in the district of Mong Kok. I'll leave out the statistical freak which, grossed up, indicates 1.9 MILLION per sq km in the Kowloon Walled City district.
The thing is that Hong Kong is not "full" by any stretch of the imagination. If new housing needs to be built they just build it - and they build it properly. If it needs billions of dollars of infrastructure to support it, then that simply gets built as well. And we're not talking about pokey little apartments with wafer-thin plasterboard walls like you get here. We're talking about 2,500 square foot four and five bedroom homes with reinforced concrete walls. The average new-build UK house, whose walls bend when you lean on them, for I live in one such, is 3.2 bedrooms and just over 900 square feet spread over two floors. On a floodplain.
Britain is plainly not over-populated. Am I the only person here who thinks that we are guilty of squandering land and that the problem lies not with immigrants but with a massive failure of imagination, coupled with a refusal to pay for 21st century infrastructure, that goes back for generations?
[Updated on: Wed, 25 July 2007 16:22]
If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving isn't for you.
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Round here it's only really humid when there's about to be a torrential thunderstorm ... so no thanks!
28 degrees would be nice though. Will there actually be a summer this year in the UK?
David
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With house prices at what they are at the moment, who can afford a well-built house?
I can certainly see that the temptation, if you were a developer, would be to buy cheap land, build cheap houses, and sell them for maximum mark-up. There are so many people clamouring for houses that there's almost no prospect that you won't be able to sell to somebody.
David
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The price of a house and its cost are two entirely different things. You just have to look at your buildings insurance to realise that.
Hugs
N
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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I live in a house whose cost is substantially less than its price. I know houses in a great area whose cost is substantially greater than their price.
But the argument about building on flood plains is a vital one. Building a house that is uninsurable because it is a known flood risk is really insane. Buying one of these is the act of a lunatic. But giving planning permission for them because they provide council tax revenue is, in my view, criminally negligent.
But this is just one form of nature. What about the USA and tornado alley?
[Updated on: Wed, 25 July 2007 20:45]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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I have celebrated the return of mains water, albeit brackish, with soaking in the bath for an hour and filling the washing machine.
Hugs
Nigel
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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I was in Windsor today. No floods there, but I've never seen the Thames flow so FAST. Was that from your bathwater when you let it run out?
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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