Safe in the Rain

I still have some more that I want to load up about this week, but after seeing the early morning news about how badly Gloucestershire has been hit by the rain, I thought I would quickly let people know we are ok.

Gloucestershire is a big country and is roughly made up of three areas. The beautiful one is The Forest of Dean on the west side of the Severn River, which boarders Wales, the middle bit which surrounds the river Severn, and the eastern bit which is part of the Cotswolds. It is usually the middle bit that floods especially when the Severn bursts its banks, along with a few cities and towns which have drainage problems and rivers running through them.

We are in the Cotswolds bit, and our village has no rivers, streams or springs in it. In fact this was usually a disadvantage as the village often ran dry in the summer, and didn't have mains water until the mid 1960's!

It is a great home ed lesson to talk about this. I was lucky enough to be friends with one of the lovely old ladies who had lived here all her life, so I had first hand information about what it was like in the 1960s when mains electricity, water and sewage came to the village. I have been able to pass this on to the younger generation.

So what was a disadvantage in the past when we had dry weather, is now an advantage in this wet weather as we don't have problems with flooding.

With all the flooding stories in the news, this can sometimes alarm children on the spectrum, who may take it in, but won't necessarily be able to express their fear. Sometimes you think that they are not worried about something because they don't seem to be reacting, only to find that they have been dwelling on it for weeks!

On of the things we did to combat this, as flooding often comes up in discussions about global warming, was to get hold of a 'proper' atlas. These days geography seems to put more emphasis on social geography, but we found a lovely old senior school atlas in a charity shop that had proper physical geography maps in it.

We sat in bed late one night looking at the land levels and checking out where all our friends and family lived, and decided how far the sea level would have to rise before they were flooded. Luckily at the time most people Ram knew were living high enough that they wouldn't be flooded.

But now that Ursula has moved to the York area I may have to be a bit careful about that one!

I hope everyone in the flooded area is safe enough to look upon this as a learning experience.