Water, Water

Thankfully, the parish of Swanvale Halt hasn't suffered too badly from the recent extreme weather. Between the village and Hornington there are meadows which are there in order to absorb floodwater, and so flood they have, and it's been remarkable to see the resulting lake appear and recede several times over the course of the last couple of months. The parish largely clings to the northern side of Swanvale Hill, and then, very broadly speaking, slopes downward to the river. It's the area at the bottom of the hill, a mixture of old cottages, terraced houses and more modern developments, which has seen the worst problems.

Our other problem has been repeated power cuts and we had one of those on Saturday, so with all the possibilities of non-computer-based work exhausted I went to see what was going on at the foot of the hill, and to visit Martha, a relatively recently-arrived member of the congregation who's been heavily involved in churches elsewhere and who lives in a Council bungalow in a 1960s development on the flattest of the flat land near the river. She showed me some of the empty houses whose residents were boated out by the Council on Christmas Eve when the first floods arrived; about twelve of the properties are still occupied, including hers. There are sandbags at doors and as you pass some of the empty buildings you can actually smell mildew. At the back of Martha's bungalow is a tall bank fringing an older development of houses to the north. She told me that when she moved in the water running down from the rest of the parish to the north, and through the grass bank immediately above, made the house so damp that for months she'd regularly find huge slugs on the kitchen floor. She got used to waking in the night and going out to collect and expel them. Eventually the Council dug a trench around the house, fitted new drains and sorted out the water problem, but it took a while.

We talked about what the church might do in this situation. In more floodstruck parts of the county the churches have been thoroughly involved in the relief effort and the natural response is to think about helping too. We concluded that there wasn't much to be done in our own area apart from encouraging people to keep an eye on their neighbours: I know from experience that all the people I have contact with who might be considered 'vulnerable' have plenty of folk looking in on them. That doesn't sound much, but perhaps it's not a bad thing that not much else is needed.