Storm stories and the learning abilities of small children.

Hundreds of houses have apparently been flooded. On the news I heard the prime minister being heckled a) for arriving too late at one of the flooded villages, well after much cleaning up had been done, I suppose, and b) for not really doing anything about it. The last accusation is perhaps a little unfair. He can’t be held personally responsible for the storm. One could almost, but not quite, feel sorry for him.

My daughter and I were talking about it earlier today and wondered if the amount of new building in unsuitable places, on flood plains for example, has caused flooding in places which never used to flood on the past, as the water has nowhere to go. This has happened a lot around here.

House insurance does have somewhere to go; upwards! My daughter found that the insurance quote for a house she owns had increased considerably. The explanation was that her house is in a postcode area which has flooded on the last couple of years. Her house, however, is half way up a hillside, well above the streets which flooded. It took some arguing to reduce the quote.

She was lucky. Those whose houses flooded have great difficulty finding an insurer at any price. Such are the consequences of storms,

Another consequence of Storm Dennis has been stories about “ghost ships”. All this is because an empty ship washed up on the shore of Ireland during the storm. The MV Alta was an old vessel, sailing since 1976 under the flag of Tanzania until it changed hands in 2017. In September 2018 it set of from Greece to Haiti but ran into difficulties off Bermuda. The crew was rescued and taken to Puerto Rico and arrangements were made for the vessel to be towed to Guyana. But en route it was hijacked and nothing more was heard of it until August 2019 when it was encountered floating empty in mid-Atlantic. After that it seems to have floated around, only to end up somewhere off Cork. Nobody knows how it stayed afloat.

There are other stories about ‘ghost ships’:-

“In ocean lore, the story of the ghost ship the Flying Dutchman is a myth dating from the 1700s. The Mary Celeste, in contrast, was real: it was found abandoned, heading for the strait of Gibraltar in 1872, the crew’s fate a mystery.
More recently, in 2006 the tanker Jian Seng was found off the coast of Queensland, Australia, without a crew, the identity of its owner and its origins unclear.
In 2016 a wooden houseboat washed ashore on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Made with driftwood and polystyrene and fitted with solar panels, it turned out to have been built by Rick Small, a Canadian environmentalist who had given the boat away and had no idea how it ended up crossing the ocean unmanned.”

Tall stories!

Now for a bit of sociological stuff.

I received this text about my three year old granddaughter this morning from my daughter:-

 “I just caught Lydia saying ‘Disney Life’ to the TV remote. I asked her what she was doing and she said, ‘talking to the telly like Uncle Joel does. Uncle Joel is really good at talking to the telly and getting a show to come on’.”

I was reminded of a young friend of mine who came across her three year old sitting in front of the TV set trying to change channels by swiping across the screen, as she knew was possible on the iPad. 

Small children have an amazing ability to assimilate and take for granted technology which befuddles us older adults and seems like a kind of magic!