Scrobs with mum and sister in Yalding - 1954.
Yalding has flooded since time immemorial! The River Medway takes no prisoners, and often the smaller Rivers Teise and Beult, do just as much damage along their banks, and Scrobs had first-hand experience of driving his car into a deep puddle on the Beult not far away, near Smarden in 2000, never to return (the car that was - it was a write-off)!
So politicians all decide to get in on the act, and make fools of themselves, when a lovely small Kent village gets clobbered yet again. The Prime Minister visits and utters the immortal words, so loved by people who know they will do damn all about the situation, "We are here to learn lessons"! The Leader of KCC also turns up a day later to try and explain why nobody answered the emergency phones over Christmas. Perhaps if there was a little more money around, like some wasted on obscene compensation payments paid to failed departing senior staff, he might have got a few people willing to come and help.
Rivers are a priority for The Environment Agency, and until they and the politicians and their 'consultants' stop 'learning', and actually do something about flood defences, river management, and development control in flood plains etc, I'm afraid this delightful village will get flooded again and again. My heart goes out to the good people there, as it did at Boscastle, Tewkesbury, Workington, Worcester, Bewdley and all the other places where rivers just revert to their natural state. Perhaps a few million kept back from foreign anti-flood projects might help.
But by the time something actually happens, hell will have frozen over, so perhaps that is what politicians are all hoping for.
