Jackie measures our rainfall every month with a cunningly designed PET fizzy drink bottle rain holder and funnel. December was a wet month with 113mm of rain in our gauge. That is not exceptionally large – the average for the 30 years to 2010 at Shoreham is 80mm (the Met Office provided that figure). But last December there was just 20mm of rain in our garden – clearly the variation can be large.
But it has been wet. Walking along the Downs Link between Henfield and Partridge Green a couple of weeks ago I took a picture of the river and adjacent flooded fields.
For clarification I should explain that the river is on the left. Less dramatically, our garden pond is brimful, something rarely achieved all year when the marginal vegetation is sucking up the water and releasing it to the air. At the moment the pond reminds me of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, by John Keats:
“The sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing”.
Not that there is any sedge by our ‘lake’, and, as it happens, a blackbird was singing this morning before the rain started. As another aside I recall that Flanders and Swan interpreted the title of the poem as ‘the woman who never says thank you’.
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