Rivers remind us that what goes up must come down
SOME people listen to the Shipping Forecast to soothe them but there is equal satisfaction to be found in the lesser known weekly river flow updates for England issued by the Environment Agency.
The pleasure of following these weekly missives posted online is in a similar vein to the evening Shipping Forecast: a curious conflicting sense of being both humbled by the sheer magnitude of the world and yet still an intrinsic part of it. Thinking about the weather can do that to you; make one feel small and big at the same time.
To break it down: the riverflow update shows what rainfall there has been in the past week and how it has been assimilated by the 41 great waterways of England (with apologies to readers in Scotland and Wales, the borders are sealed).
Each river is assigned a colour ranging from green (normal) to red (exceptionally low) to black (exceptionally high).
At the moment only south of the Tyne is given a red dot and all the rest is a healthy green – although the rainfall does not get reported until the following week, so the biblical downpours of recent days are yet to be recorded. On Monday 100mm of rainfall fell in Snowdonia, 70mm in Cumbria and 60mm in Dartmoor. The rivers will swallow all of that up.
It is a pleasure to look at a map of the country through its waterways rather than its urban landmarks: towns, cities, motorways and the like. Following the movements of the Avon, Dove and Swale is far more pleasurable than a sat nav showing a gridlocked M1.
But also in an election week and new era of hung parliaments there is something enjoyable in watching the process of ebb and flow. To look at the rivers is to glean the sense that all these disparate parts of our country are connected, and that what goes up must eventually come down.