Been here since Monday to see my sis, bro in law and nephew, and help them with running their smallholding. They produce half of their own food, all of their own electricity, and try and be as self-sufficient as possible, which is what everybody should be doing, but it's bloody hard work.
They live in a forest on a south-facing hillside, home to a lot more wildlife than what I see back in my woods in Essex, so it's nice to be back here. The change of scenery is definitely welcome after not going away from home since September. It's wet though. But then so is everywhere else in the UK right now.
In fact getting here was a big pain in the arse 'cause some of the damned railway infrastructure here was washed away by the floods.
And speaking of floods, apparently the wet weather is here to stay for the next few weeks. I've been reading a lot about why the weather is getting wilder - I mean I'm pretty sure that as a child, the weather was more varied on a day to day basis rather than having either wet weather or dry weather systems affecting the country for several weeks at a time.
This article explains (among many other things) that it's because the jet stream is slowing down, and so can't push the pressure systems around as quickly as it could, so therefore they linger and so we get prolonged weather systems.
It (and several other articles I've read) also explains that this is happening 'cause of climate change, and also that the effects of having prolonged weather spells contribute to the severity of any extreme weather we get... Sort of like a vicious circle.
There's a lot of debate about whether current climate change is because of man-made causes (I believe it is, most climate scientists apparently think it is too), but it's still something we all should be thinking harder about how to combat. We ignore this at our peril, IMO. I hope the floods and droughts that are hitting the western world hard right now will raise awareness of this.
