w.atching the w.orld unw.ind

Today's lyric:
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"Summertime withers as the sun descends
He wants to kiss you. Will you condescend?
Before you wake and find a chill within your bones
Under a fine canopy of lover's dust and humorous bones."

Elvis Costello: "The birds will still be singing"

From the album: "The Juliet Letters"

Watched an interesting programme on C5 last night, which posited the impact on the UK's eastern coast of a nightmare North Sea storm, coinciding on its arrival with the peak of a Spring high tide.

Goodbye (again) Canvey Island.

But also goodbye Thames Barrier (been on that), the Underground and Canary Wharf, so the capitol's main transport system, financial centre - and global confidence in London as a trading centre - washed away in hours.

Selfishly, I hope never to live through such an event occurring, but professionally, I was staggered at the easy destruction of millions of lives and homes and businesses.

In some ways it brought home the devastation of the Indonesian tsunami even more graphically, because you could actually relate to such an event, rather than reacting to the two-dimensional images of catastrophe depicted on tv which, though obviously shocking and distressing in their own right, were sometimes too 'remote' to have the full impact which such a disaster merited.

Labels: Climatology, Observation