Floody fear | Jabbering Journo column

To put this into context I am a little over-dramatic and what we are really talking about here is a spot of bad drainage and an overly large puddle, of the type a medium-sized toddler would like to splash in wearing wellies, but you wouldn’t choose to park the car in or attempt to ford by foot.

The local birds have already earmarked my front drive as their handy lake of choice as they can hop out easily... and I saw a feral cat taking a sip.

I also live - more or less -at the top of the hill so it remains unlikely I’ll have to repair the holey, small motor- boat (it once graced Windermere) I have stashed at the back of my garage.

Nonetheless, I have the fear.

The fear the water is going to stop lapping at my doorstep and start lapping onto my hall carpet.

The fear that I will be forced to live upstairs, marooned, while objects float about my living room.

But as well as a nervous twitch at increasing flood alerts and rain warnings, what it has mainly done is given me a great deal of empathy with those whose lives have been turned entirely upside down with recent and less-recent floods of the much more serious variety.

The British weather, with all its quirky extremes and seasonal unpredictability, is one of things you can do absolutely nothing about.

Short of the entire popular of our Great British island home upping sticks and living in a teetering city right at the top of a mountain, it’s unclear how we protect against our changing climate - though in my case I probably just need to sort the drains out.

In the short term we can throw money at the solutions fo flooding prevention but it’s clear that humankind needs to take stock of the realities of climate change and make meaningful decisions about the way we live to minimise the misery.

If this is how I feel about a puddle - my heart goes out to those facing real life-altering flooding right now.