What must it be like…

What must it be like to stare out across the polluted, stinking, gnat-ridden flood water, whether it’s in your house, or just lapping at the sandbags piled around your house, what must it be like to know that this is going to go on day after miserable day, for the foreseeable future, and to look up at the grey sky and see more rain falling?

It must be so hard for those people, not just thinking about what they have lost, but just existing from day to day with no sign of any improvement. The pumping of flood water has had to stop in some parts of Somerset because it damaging the banks of the river they are pumping in to; this could cause more water to escape across the land. All the joys of living in the country must have long since dissolved in the deluge; the wildlife, small mammals, birds, and even fish have been lost, plants and crops drowned, even the bugs,insects and creepy things have not survived, except the gnats. It must be cold too, that deep body of water, meters deep, must be cold.

However hard the public services and armed forces and individual volunteers work, and however selflessly people share fodder and feed for animals, homes and contributions for those who are for the moment homeless, the sheer amount of work which needs to be done, the enormous expense of it all, the challenge of making a difference is enormous, and the time-scale never-ending.