Born to ramble

Several thoughts for the day:

(1) Marilyn French passed away over the weekend. An article here. It's so sad. The Women's Room is one of my favourite books - it really means a lot to me.

(2) It is obviously almost summer - the little bats have started flying around the garden again. I love the way they fly - so erratic but at the same time very graceful.

(3) I was secretly hoping someone in my office would get swine flu so I could have a week off work whilst being quarantined. I know this makes me a bad person, but in my defence, I was only hoping they'd get a *mild* case. Obviously, I have now ensured that should a terrible pandemic break out, I will totally be patient zero and die an horrible, lingering death. There'll probably be boils involved. You know, just because.

(4) Annie Lennox is totally awesome.

Holy Crap - it's snowing! Cue immediate doom and catastrophe.

The much promised snow has arrived and to celebrate, the whole of the South East has plunged into hysterical chaos. I shit you not. London is carnage - enter at your own risk. Let's face it, if you *do* go in, there is no guarantee you'll ever get out again. Alive. Or at least for a few hours. You'll probably be hungry anyway. And a bit cold.

The day started promisingly. Get to station and find train only 5 minutes late, despite coming in from the Cotswolds, which seems to have some sort of doom-ray effect on train scheduling at the best of times. A commuter comes off the phone - he has discovered that there is No Tube. There is some muttering, people with lap tops look this up. He is fear-mongering - there is Some Tube. Or, to be precise, the Victoria Line. Which is notable because it is *absolutely no use* to 90% of the commuters on the train. But, there are also No Buses. Muttering gets louder and a bit more hysterical. Some people exit the train at the next stop, having happily discovered they don't need to go to work. Then - Paddington station is closed! Oh, the panic! Where will we end up? Stranded at Slough? Luckily, this only refers to the underground, which is pretty helpful. Will have to walk to the City.

Only problem is that I have no idea how to walk to the City. My geography of London only exists through the map of the Underground. Someone helpfully directs me. Should take an hour. Hah! HAAAAH. 45 minutes later, am still delicately tripping along Oxford St as the pavement and roads resemble a giant ice rink. Give up and attempt the central line. Takes another 20mins to get on tube and am wedged into someone's armpit. This, I think cheerfully, is more like a normal day on the central line. Jolly good. Emerge to voicemail from a colleague telling me to give up and go home. At 10am. After an hour and an half of valiant struggling. Apparently colleagues in far away places like Marylebone and Clapham have decided they can't get in. Have small but violent fit outside of the Royal Exchange. Tramp back to tube station in vile mood and narrowly avoid being speared in the eye by icicles falling off the ledges of trendy glass buildings. Spend another 2.5 hours getting home again. Prepare to make same pointless pilgrimage tomorrow.

What is truly wonderful (or terrifying, depending how you look at it) is that everyone else tramping the streets of London is also having a similar experience, so the capital is like somewhere that has been infected by a virus inducing temporary but violent tourette-like outbursts. Awesome.

On the plus side, I took some great photos with my phone of the snowy City. If I could work out how to upload them, I totally would. But, you know. Meh. It's snow. In London. You can imagine it.

In other news...

A good article on the return of Peter Mandelson - which I think took most of us by surprise (indeed, my reaction was "WTF?").

Bad things going down in Iceland. The global economic situation just gets more and more terrifying every day. In a surreal way. In the City things seem to have calmed down a bit. I think this is more because the anticipated bad things have actually started to happen (nothing worse than waiting) rather than because things are getting better.

I still have a cold, which seems to be getting worse again. To console myself, I shall go to the farmers market, get sourdough bread, make some chilli (yum - trying to recreate the great chilli I had in the US this summer) and then play WoW until the weather improves enough for me to get a life...

Abort! Abort!

Holy Crap - nevermind The Grudge, Bloomberg at the moment is probably the scariest thing I've ever seen. It's red - it's all red, red everywhere... apart from gold! Woo- if only I had some!

On the plus side, I have no savings to lose - hurrah for living beyond my means! On the negative, I do still have a job to lose. Argh (grips face rather like the Scream).

Great graphs though. It feels a bit like a Special Family Emergency. Time for cake and a medicinal whisky.

Breathe, Heloise, Breathe.

Row, row, row your boat...

Hasn't this week been exciting? Floods, surges, sandbags... Yes indeed, if it hadn't been terrifying it would have been rather exhilerating. Luckily, the waters did not reach the Heloise-stronghold, although we did at one point make an emergency dash to the sandbag pick-up point. Filling and lugging sandbags in the rain was not pleasant but being flooded is hardly a picnic either, so I can't really complain.

So. National disaster, tragedy all round, lots of nice "human suffering" features on the BBC etc.

Predictably, this is where I'm going to stop being uncontroversial and start being a little critical.

1) Not really a national disaster. Yes it was terrible for the people whose homes were flooded. Yes it is horrible that they will have to wait 18 months until it gets sorted. Being without water is almost unimaginable and I am exceedingly glad that it didn't happen to me. However: the emergency services coped, some disasters were averted, water is being flown in, insurance will be paid. It was hardly Hurricane Katrina though. People aren't going to return to their homes a year later and discover dead bodies in wrecked houses, or realise they will never be able to go back to their city...

2) Far be it from me to detract from the (considerable) suffering of the fairly wealthy south, but it seems to me that the flooding of Hull, some weeks before this, was actually more disasterous. All the more so for being almost completely ignored. 17,000 homes in Hull were flooded and uninhabitable. That's quite a lot. And all we heard were people blaming the north for not being insured. Hardly the sympathetic treatment given to, say Tewkesbury (which I happen to be rather fond of).

3) News coverage was a bit gratuitous. Or should I say *is*. Whilst away (in the north) we discovered that Oxford was flooded and were informed by a breathless reporter, that the site of the Heloise stronghold was flooded. You can imagine the doom and panic this inspired - far away from home, unable to defend property etc etc. So much so, a long-suffering colleague agreed to cycle down and check it out. Oh the humiliation when it turned out the river had not even burst its banks. There's also been a bit too much badgering by news reporters, who seem to be out to win prizes for making people cry. "Everyone's been very kind" says an old lady. "But aren't you upset that all of your possessions are gone - things that can't be replaced" urges the sincere-eyed news reporter. Leave the old lady alone! Don't compound her misery by making her cry on national TV.

In summary - yes it is horrible and some poor people are going to have to endure the consequences for a long time. Let's not blow this out of proportion though. We in the UK are lucky enough to live somewhere where extremes of weather and natural disasters happen extremely rarely. Moping around feeling sorry for ourselves is hardly going to endear us to anyone.