Flood

Floods everywhere and never have I felt this lucky to live on high ground. I once read that we live at the same level as the top of Blackpool Tower, which seems the place to be now that The Flood has started. It's good to know that when the Flood waters recede, the only people left on the planet will be fans of the Chuckle Brothers or Roy Chubby Brown. The talk is about climate change, of course, but I blame a far greater menace in the form of Alan Titchmarsh. Ours is one of the last gardens around here that isn't covered by ornamental stones inspired by his gardens. I imagine that the rest of the country is the same. The country is suffering skin suffocation, like the Bond girl in Goldfinger, with just a small gap at the base of the country's spine where the water can leak away. Of course, the other thing I don't hear many experts point out is that flood plains usually exist for a reason and just because somewhere doesn't flood for a decade or more, doesn't mean it doesn't flood regularly according to geological age. Not that it helps the pool souls I see being ferried out of their homes in rubber dingies and deposited before the Sky News cameras. But then, just because you've not been shown trying to climb out of a rubber dingy wearing your old pyjamas in the past ten years doesn't mean it doesn't happen regularly according to the Sky News calendar… Here in the dry (but cold), what should have been an easy matter of sending off a manuscript suddenly turned ugly when Thunderbird popped up with a message, pointing out that the sample of the book was a whopping 31 megabytes. I built this PC for video editing and rendering 3D graphics, so I tend to forget how big my Word files can get. I've packed the book with drawings – I think there were about eighty at the last count -- which means the sample probably had about 30. That wouldn't have been too bad but now I come to look at then, every single one was 2000 pixels wide, probably a megabyte in size. I spent about two hours slowly bringing the sizes down until it was a more reasonable sample. I still removed a few drawings to get it to a size that wouldn't seize up the agent's inbox. Anyway, the manuscript is gone. All I can do now is wait for a reply or The Deluge, and I'm not entirely certain which will come first.