rain, rain

We watched the news footage last night of the stall holders at the Badminton Horse Trials packing up to go home before they had the chance to sell a thing, as the entire event was cancelled due to waterlogging, and I hoped that some of those London based journalists who sneer at politicians and retailers who ever dare to suggest that severe weather might, just might, have an impact on economic activity were watching.  There is an awful lot of surface water around.  I know that we are still in drought, but surface water isn't the same as ground water.

The Systems Administrator downloaded our rainfall statistics for the year from the weather station, and gave me the edited highlights.  In the year to the end of April 2012 we had 573.5mm, give or take.  I don't suppose that the electronic rain monitor is accurate to the last half millimetre, but it's probably a more reliable figure than taking readings from a plastic rain gauge.  That's quite a lot, by our standards.  The Chatto Garden's website gives the regional average as 500mm, and they are barely more than a mile from us.  Wikipedia identifies St Osyth, four miles or so up the road, as the driest place in the country with average precipitation of 513mm.  It is curious that the driest place in the country should have 13mm more rain than the regional average, but it goes to show that statistics are tricky things, and that there is a certain amount of competition for the lowest rainfall (I have heard a spokesman for Cambridge Botanic claim the honour for that city).

Anyway, 573mm is quite a lot, for us.  To put it in context, the average for England and Wales for the period 1971 to 2000 was 926.9mm, so we got a whole 62% of the national average.  You can amuse yourself trying to guess which places in the Mediterranean get the same annual rainfall as coastal Essex.  Our long term average is slightly below that of Jerusalem, and in the past twelve months we've had a little less than an average year in Palermo.

It gets really startling when you look at when the rain fell.  In April 2012 we had 95.3mm.  That's 17% of our annual total in one month.  By way of comparison, in April 2011 we had 1.4mm.  Yes, 1.4mm.  This April it rained sixty-eight times as much as it did last year.  In March 2012 we had 39.5mm, 7% of the year's total, giving us nearly a quarter of the whole year's rain in those two months.  In March 2011 we had 6.3mm, bringing the grand total for March and April of last year to 7.7mm, versus 134.8mm in the same two months of this year.  Since midnight last night we've had another 20mm, so May 2012 is off to a flying start.

The gunnera bed is a swamp.  I walked around the back garden this morning to see what it was doing, because I hadn't been out there for such a long time, and the lawns squelched beneath my feet.  Until it dries out a bit I really shouldn't walk on it at all.  Every step will be compacting the soil.

Addendum  I heard a cuckoo calling, the first I've heard this year, though a colleague thought they'd heard one at work.  This one sounded loud and close, from the direction of our wood.  The swallows and house martins are back, hunting for insects above the garden, though they don't nest here.