Saturday, September 10, 2011

No more hurricanes, thanks

America is being a tad too generous with its ex-hurricanes at the moment. So far we've had the tail-end of Irene (gales, rain); Katia is expected on Sunday night (more gales); and Lee is hovering in the wings and looking far too likely to cruise across the Atlantic in the other storms' wake.

This is Not Good if you're about to put your house up for sale. We're eyeing the nearby trees nervously and wondering if they're going to chuck nasty big branches all over the garden, or even worse, topple over on the roof. It's a nerve-wracking time.

The rain, on the other hand, is welcome. We heard on the local news last week that this summer has been the driest in the West Midlands since the long hot summer of 1976. Pretty much everywhere else has had a damp and depressing summer but every time it rained somewhere else, Birmingham missed it. The end result is a garden that looks as thought someone poisoned it, since so many plants are either losing their leaves to conserve moisture, or dying. We've been watering but there's only so much you can do with a hosepipe; what we really need is several days of good, heavy, non-stop rain.

Perhaps we need those hurricanes after all...

2 comments:

Possbert said...

It's odd - you don't think of Britain as being dry. Well, I don't. Australia, yes. This year we went 60 days without rain but ended up with the wettest winter for quite a while. It still wasn't enough and the dams are less than 50% full. Canning Dam is down to 36%.

Hope your home sells quickly!

Fiona Glass said...

Thank you!

And no, we don't think of Britain as dry either, which is why it's so difficult when we do go long periods without rain.

Eeek on your reservoirs! Is that particularly bad, or just par for the course?