Week note 47

This won’t be a long one this week. Writing words to write some words.

Off work on holiday. Spent a very cold week in Northumberland. Walking, eating, failing to relax (see next paragraph). It was beautiful, sparkly with frost and did I mention cold?

I’m having (another) really rough spell of ADHD + perimenopause + a bunch of hard stuff in my personal life. Very much crawling towards Christmas at this point. Motivation to do much of anything is lacking. My sparkle is not sparkling. There’s a level of anger (perimenopause?) that’s simmering in me and I don’t like it. I’m struggling to relax, sit still, not be in constant motion.

Flooding

The weekend has been incredibly stressful with Storm Bert, the rain and the inevitable flooding.

Our stream was in minor flood yesterday and major flood most of the day today. The river we feed into (the Trothy) hit its highest level ever recorded today. If we hadn’t done the spiling in early spring I honestly dread to think what we’d be dealing with right now.

I am going to have to seriously rethink the whole lower area of the garden now. Need to spile that end and figure out raising the level up. And then something that can cope with flooding - planting and rethinking my seating area plan.

And I’m on a mission to figure out what the hell is going on upstream that is causing this flooding. My suspicion is bad land management. But then, what to do about it? It’s having such a bad impact on us all downstream. The culverts under the lane just can’t cope with the volume. The lane is getting washed away with each flood. And Monmouthshire do bugger all to fix our roads. And it's all only going to get worse

[An aside on roads: we were up in very rural Northumberland, more rural than where we are. The roads though, a delight, newly paved, all in a really good state. And I'm talking country lanes, single tracks, not big, major roads. Come home to the highest council tax local authority in Wales and there's more pothole than road on every single type of road. Where is all that money going?]

The flooding across Wales has been awful today - Pontypridd, Conwy up in North Wales, the Usk Valley (Abergavenny, Crickhowell etc) is under water. Nigh on impossible to move around the county today.

We recorded just shy of 9 centimetres of rain in 2 days.

Why are we not taking this seriously? Why are we not planning and preparing for what is our new normal?

Things I need to catch up on

• Lee Water’s new podcast on the inner working of Welsh Gov and the Senedd. Thoughts from me next week.
• Plaid Cymru’s plan to fix the NHS in Wales.
• Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, treated myself to this year’s Booker Prize winner.