According to the Peep at the Past in this week's Driffield Times harvest 1958 was very similar to that of today - only half the grain harvested by mid-September and moisture content above 20 per cent.

According to the weather pundits, put this summer down anywhere in the 1960s and it wouldn't have seemed out of the ordinary.

Indeed, when my husband heard this he regaled me with horror stories of combines running through water and cutting only the heads off the corn. So we've seen it all before.

But - back to my pet subject - what we haven't seen before is the floods that threatened this weekend. While there have been wet summers and wet decades, an octagenarian in our village cannot remember seeing the village flooded before or even threatened with flooding.

This again brings me back to my pet subject - the cleaning out of dykes and ditches (aka drainage channels) and dredging of waterways.

In the good old days before Street Scene existed, workers actually held shovels and drove diggers to keep the drains running free.

This doesn't appear to happen anymore. Again in this week's Driffield Times we see that the East Riding of Yorkshire Council has hosted a multi-agency meeting to talk about floods. One great quote from this report goes: "We aim to look at cross agency working across the region is to priorities agrred by all, and that different agencies take ownership at senior level of the recommendations of the Flood Review Panel.'

With all due respect to its originator - what modern, meaningless twaddle, the sort of fhetoric designed to make the reader/listener believe they are missing the point and the type of political comment that can nebver rebound because no-one knows what it means.

And again in this week's Driffield Times there is a story about floods being (allegedly) averted in Wansford by the construction of a bywash on the canal. This work was orchestrated by a group of volunteers (the Driffield Navigation Amenities Association) and has been, as far as I know and apart from a bit of cosmetic gully cleaning, the only action anyone has taken locally with regards to water being able to drain away via a watercourse.

Meanwhile I sent my thoughts on drains and ditches and dykes and men holding shovels to the East Riding of Yorkshire Council, the Environment Agency and Yorkshire Water, via their websites. Each promised to address my comments.

A gentleman from the ERYC tried telephoning me at home and finally e-mailed me to ask when I would be in. I replied to request that, as I worked full-time, he e-mail his reply. That has not happened. However the silence from the the Environment Agency and Yorkshire Water has been deafening, so I suppose ERYC deserves some marks for effort if not an explanation of policy.

So apart from talking in Beverley and probably staying, on expenses, at the Beverley Arms and consuming copious amounts of bottled water, I have yet to see what practical action any one of the different agencies have done to 'take ownership' of the problems in the last year.

And it would be nice if that is not the case that at least one of them would have the courtesy to come back to me and highlight their activities.

We chanced to be in West Lutton (which comes under the jurisdiction of the North Yorkshire County Council) the other evening after a 15-minute deluge had caused chaos.

 

The waters were subsiding as we arrived but all was covered in a slimy layer of what may or may not have been been sewage and the place stank to high heaven.

 

The landlord of the pub was, complete with waders, trying to find the drain, the blockage of which appeared to be the reason why his premises were now surrounded by a moat of brown, smelly water. Meanwhile the occupant of a nearby new home was frantically brushing water away from her back door.

By then the Gypsey Race has subsided somewhat but was still overflowing and little wonder, as, on the eastern approaches to the village, it was completely choked with weed and the water would have had little chance of getting away.

This morning (Friday August 8) the situation is repeated in Gilberdyke and other villages on both the north and south banks of the Humber. Heavy rain overnight has caused flooding. One poor chap in Owston Ferry (North Lincs) was telling how he had been out of house and home for 23 weeks after the June 25 2007 floods and faced the same prospect again. I bet his house is uninsureable now!

Now I don't know the reason for today's flooded homes, but I do know the reason for the floods in the village where I live. One reason was the Driffield Navigation, which overflowed because the Wansford Lock was blocked, there was no bywash and the water washing down off the Wolds had to go somewhere.

The group of volunteers whose job it is to oversee the canal, and its restoration, have now the money and contractors in place to sort out the bywash, which should alleviate problems at that end of the village.

At the other end of the village problems arose when dykes and ditches backed up in face of the heavy rain which fell all day on June 25 after a wet spring when land was already saturated.

Now, paid officials from the East Riding Council, Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency have been and looked and talked. There has been a prolonged public consultation and a policy document. Communication  issues have been highlighted and the the agencies will, in the future, have better interaction when disaster threatens.

Councillors, on expenses, have walked the dykes and muttered and tuttered and, to be fair, have tried to help, been concerned and generally done their bit.

But, as yet, we have to see ANYONE DRIVING A DIGGER LET ALONE (HEAVEN PRESERVE US) ANYONE WIELDING EITHER A SHOVEL OR A DRAINING ROD.

And, to be honest, they're the only men you want.

It's been a year of all talk and no action - and the result was apparent for all to see in the Wolds Valley villages on Wednesday night - and perhaps Gilberdyke and Owston Ferry this morning.

The most worrying thing is that, while the prolonged and heavy downpour of June 25 2007 was something else, this week's downpours have been no more than normal summer storms.

Is it not about time to talking stopped and the action started, before more people, like the poor chap in Owston Ferry, are out of house and home for another six months of their lives?

Did you see how Friends of the Northfield Park are contemplating not using an anti-vandal audio device because it may breach the human rights of the little toe-rags who can, and sometimes do, cause havoc in the Remembrance Garden and adjacent park.

I could not believe this story when I saw it.

Vandalism must cost the tax payer £1,000s. There's the cost of putting things right - and if it's council property that is being despoiled or defaced the cost of that is borne by us - the council tax payer.

If it's private property that's attacked, the cost of renewal, redecoration or repair it is generally borne by the victim - probably a council tax payer.

Vandalism done to public open spaces makes victims of us all. And for the life of me I cannot understand why we victims have not only to pay the price but also pussyfoot around the people who perpetrate these dirty deeds.

A decent society is judged by the way it treats not only its elderly and its its sick and vulnerable but also its wrongdoers.  It's a mark of a civilised society that we treat our wrongdoers with mercy. That says more about us than it does about the vandals and criminals among us.

So I'm not advocating the stocks, stoning or public beatings. We are moe civilised than that.

But surely the issue of human rights has been taken far too far when we become squeamish about scaring a few ne'er-do-well kids with some loud noises that only they can hear.

What is the world coming to?

http://www.driffieldtoday.co.uk/news/Human-rights-of-park-vandals.4122799.jp

TURN on the news and it's all there: World food shortages; banks in crisis; oil price soaring; recession looming...

We were at a meeting the other evening when our speaker, an otherwise jovial chap who interspersed his doom-laden theories with jokes and funny anecdotes, quite seriously predicted that the UK would be a third-world nation within 15 years.

This caused me (a You've Never Had It So Good baby boomer) to think about the road ahead for my children and grandchildren, who, whether our speaker's crystal ball was cloudy or not, will certainly not know the freedoms - from world travel being a not unreasonable aspiration to the Sunday roast being every Englishman's inalienable right - that we have experienced and enjoyed without so much as a thought.

And perhaps that's the problem: We have (well I have) accepted all these blessings as a right not to be denied and, among all the trappings of modern 'civilisation'. lost sight of what's important.

The chap who was speaking was well-travelled and had met several primitive peoples with very little compared to our lavish lives. He said that, in the main, he found them happier and more contented with their lot than we have ever been.

His words reminded me of a letter I heard long ago - allegedly from Native American chief Seattle to president Franklin Pierce in 1854 when the Washington states had to be ceded to the Union.

Although its origin is disputed you cannot knock the sentiments contained therein:

"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the earth is sacred to my people.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs.

The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man.

We do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.

Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.

The end of living and the beginning of survival."

The end of living and the beginning or survival? Call me a doom and gloom merchant but that's what it feels like at the moment.