Family life

I drove over Eckington Bridge today, for the first time in over a week. A set of temporary traffic lights replaced the waterlogged fixtures. The flood waters had retreated significantly, though the river was running fast, brown and high. The sky was blue, peppered with puffy, pure white clouds: a perfect summer afternoon.

When I got out of my car to survey the scene, the air smelled of rotting miscellanea. A thick crust of damp sludge covered the entire surface of the riverside car park. The grassy banks were everywhere coated with a crisp shell of dried mud.

A family of swans paddled purposefully upstream against the strong current. Life appears, superficially, almost normal again, as the land recovers from the elemental devastation wrought by the torrential rains of last weekend.