Hell Freezes Over

It was silly o clock and I gave up on sleep. I collected my iPhone and electronic book, charging on the landing and crawled back into bed.

I had been listening for weather for the last couple of hours. There didn't seem to be any. I realise that we are incredibly lucky, living under the Maldon Umbrella but from what I'd read about Storm Frank I thought we might get a bit of a wind. 

Since discovering Twitter I have developed a bit of an obsession with freak weather, storms and hurricanes. It's the names. It humanises the weather and makes you think of a toddler tantrum. 

Storms do nothing for the unity of a country. Especially when they add to the imagined divides imposed by its people. Silly Frank! Making life worse for those in the North, leaving us Southerners in blissful ignorance. 

When I was in Junior school we were under serious threat from the weather. We knew that we were destroying the planet and we were scared. Mrs Thain showed us pictures of how the UK would look by the time we were her age. The whole of The Wash had washed away and the coast around Essex had inched it's way closer to London. We saw grainy black and white film of people rowing down the High Streets of Somerset and the villages along the Thames, like Datchett. I remember thinking that I would like to row down the High Street, having spent all my summers helping Alex on Lake Meadows boating lake, I made a mental note to get a row boat for when I was Mrs Thain's age. (Luckily she was about 100, so I've still got plenty of time to get one).

So, we knew. We knew about global warming in the seventies and then Maggie Thatcher took it seriously; closed down the coal mines, supported nuclear power (not always kindly) and we forgot. Scientists also built good flood defences and we all felt perfectly safe once the Thames Barrier was opened in 1982.

When we forgot, we failed to notice how many times the Thames flood barrier saved London from flooding (48 times in 2014), we didn't observe the sea walls protecting us from coastal erosion. We saw fields being used as flood plains but didn't think about how that was stopping the need for everyone to own a row boat to get down the high street.

People like Jeremy Corbyn's brother get to go on TV and say that climate change doesn't exist. We like that idea. It would be so much safer if weather was cyclical and we are due a period of dry weather with normal temperatures. 

However, in my early morning Twitter-fest I discovered something rather alarming.  The temperature at the North Pole this morning was between one and two degrees Celsius. IT'S WINTER!!! This is the warmest temperature ever recorded in December. Normally, warm for the time of year would be -38•c. Two degrees is quite warm for summer. It's like Hell freezing over in reverse.

So, I'm unplugging everything, going for a walk and thinking about buying a boat.