The Lazy Sunday Service: Fearing water

I had a reminder as to why I'm cautious about buying an e-reader yesterday evening when my niece spilt an entire cup of tea over my copy of Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge, which I've nearly finished reading. A bit of a shakedown and mopping up and its still okay, albeit with half-brown, wavy pages. A kindle, I suspect, would be completely kaput, I'd have lost a lot of books, and it would cost a small fortune to replace everything.

This unfortunately has happened to a lot of people round Ireland in the past couple of days after levels of rainfall that the meterologists have said occurs every 1 in 800 years. Indeed, some weather stations are reporting their highest ever recorded levels of rainfall for a November, eight days before the month is over. The result has been much of the south and west of the country lying under several feet of water, including the whole of Cork city centre, which has just about run out of clean drinking water after a treatment plant was flooded. Several other towns including Galway, Clonmel, Carrick on Shannon, Ballinasloe, Fermoy, and Ennis are also under water, as well as many villages and individual houses, and many roads and rail routes are closed.

The rule of thumb seems to be that for every inch of water rising up a wall a month of drying is required; every foot of dirty, stinking water flowing through a house requires a year before redecorating can start. If things weren't bad enough with the recession, businesses have lost millions of euro of stock, and many homeowners will spending christmas in temporary accommodation. And to make things worse, it's still raining. I suspect 2009 will be an annus mirabilis for many Irish people. The way the economy and weather seems to be going, 2010 is unlikely to be any better.