Welsh monsoon weekend

Serves me right for not going to bed early enough, I woke up tired after sleeping uncomfortably. It rained in the night and all morning. The second named storm of the past two days has swept through Britain bringing high winds and heavy downpours in many places. The El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific has far reaching influence on weather elsewhere in the world. We may even see snow this autumn as temperatures drop. A flood alert has been issued for South Wales this morning. Drains are blocked with fallen leaves, causing huge puddles in some streets.

Extreme weather has been the subject for a dramatic story in 'The Archers' this week with a violent storm felling a tree and injuring Vince Casey, and a toppling chimney destroying the Orangery at Lower Loxley Hall on Pip and Stella's wedding day. 

Clare, up early, cooked breakfast pancakes while I was still asleep and cooked a veggie pasta for lunch while I was writing. I had a short snooze after the meal and read for a while before plucking up courage to go for a walk to clear my head. It was still raining with random gusts of wind from the west, so violent and random that I only managed to walk for a quarter of an hour before a spoke of my brolly broke and jammed the mechanism open, making it unusable and too much of a risk to leave outdoors in the  wind. Ah well, it was an old brolly in poor condition after decades of wear. Time for a new one.

Before and after supper I watched the rest of 'State of Play' which held my attention right to the end, even if the revealing of the murderer was rather an anti-climax. It won three BAFTA and proved good enough to warrant an American version appearing six years after the original was screened in 2003. The story spotlighted the background to the oil industry influence on lobbying political decision making and the scrutiny of exploitation plans in the years before global warming from fossil fuels was taken seriously. At first sight I was unsure when this movie was made. Its setting was a period piece newsroom with few computers and the odd fax machine. A lot of printed material was piled high on desks. Email was referred to very occasionally. There were no smartphones and only cassette tape recorders were in use. I thought it might be a newer movie, set twenty years ago until I looked it up on IMDB.

I reset all the household clocks before bed, as Summer Time ends tonight.