The G Word...

Just been catching up on a couple of BBC4 documentaries: the first was on farming in the early 20th Century and changes to the management of farms. Some excellent interviews and clips from early footage of how the landscape, and the way of life has changed. Great evocations of what life was like in what was seldom seen as 'the good old days'.

The second was 'RAIN' the first in the current BBC4 Weather series.

Philip Eden, talking about the Boscastle event of 2004 said:

"Any flood which happens in the West Country in the summer is a collusion of meteorology and GEOGRAPHY. You need the heavy rainfall first of all, but because the river catchments are generally speaking very small they respond very quickly to rain which falls on them."

"If the cloudburst happens exactly over that catchment, then all the water will find its way down the river and out to sea in a matter of hours."

There was also a look at the drought of 1976. Remember it quite well - went to Jersey on holiday and we hired a mini which had black leather seats: painful getting into it in short trousers after it had been sat for a couple of hours, and the work of G. J Symons, who started the system of record keeping that allows us to say that events were "the worse since records began"...

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