Brown-water rafting

Most of England has suffered far less from Storm Babet than Scotland has, but even in the Midlands we had very heavy rain overnight, and woke to flash flooding this morning. Living in a valley as we do, it was no surprise to draw the curtains and find that the road was inundated, as water poured off the sodden hillside, but with the rain easing I was reasonably confident that it would drain away quite fast, and that prediction turned out to be correct.

To cheer ourselves up from the weather, and in celebration of the Government suffering a humiliating double defeat in yesterday's by-elections, R and I took ourselves off to Stratford for lunch. The river was high, though it hadn't yet burst its vulnerable southern bank, and was running very fast, with rafts of debris washing westwards along it. The local Mallards were investigating these, but they tend to get nervy when they're being swept along at speed, so they would only ride them for a while before sliding back off into the river. The Moorhens had no such qualms though, casually sailing along like experienced rafters while fossicking around in the plant matter for food. 

The water in both the river and the canal was an unappealing brown colour. R pointed out soothingly that turbulent flow stirs up mud from the beds of watercourses, which is true. But these days we know far more in this country than most of us ever wanted to about the permitted storm overflow system, and having seen some stomach-turning sewage discharge maps on line this morning, I was heartily glad that it was the Moorhens who were having to eat food plucked from the Avon, and not me.