I feel guilty – again! Yesterday I was rather flippant about ‘Desmond’ but I was focused on the name and not on the devastating storm itself. To see your home/business/property consumed by incessant rain, overflowing rivers and drains, streams of mud and filth and know that recent history is repeating itself, is heartbreaking. ‘Lessons will be learned’ – if I have heard this saying once, in the past twenty years, I’ve heard it a hundred times. After every devastating event or trauma, it seems to me that political sticking plasters are stretched over wounds that require deeper, more intensive surgery. We seem to be able to plan and build the most complex of motorway systems yet our lesser roads remain undulating patchworks of rubble and tarmac. Bring back the Romans! They knew how to build roads, dig ditches, sink drains. Speaking of drains, I shudder to think what lies beneath our terra (un)firma and ‘passes’ as a twenty first century drainage system. 
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