Water water everywhere

With all the recent rain, our three ponds became one again and then overflowed. This can be seen as the diagonal damp patch on the lawn to the left of the angle of the paving stone, running down to the bottom right of the illustration. And from thence down the path, onto the rough cast part of the patio, down the drain and into the soak away under the part of the back lawn below that illustrated.

One side effect of all this is that the pests and weeds in one pond can migrate to the other two, in our case the weed being duck weed, thoughtfully presented by a friend of ours along with a more ornamental pond plant. Not that it really matters; more or less impossible to eradicate the stuff without clearing the ponds out and starting again. And even then it only takes some bird with dirty feet to kick it all off again. On which subject, careful inspection will reveal an erect bird facing forward just behind and to the right of the green plant which is not supposed to be a pond plant, although I suspect it quite likes damp.

When the rain really gets going this soak away fills up and then the patio starts to fill up, not too clever as the levels and water bar arrangements for our back extension are not too hot. We have been pushed in the past to bucketing the water over the water bar presented by the garage floor onto the front drive from where it can get down to the main drain easily enough. So whoever did all the extending to our house back in the 60's should have given a bit more thought to waterworks. (According to some of the old hands at TB, many young architects are hopeless in the water department. Don't really understand that the first requirement of a building is to keep water out, never mind architect that result. Far too full of colour supplement design fads to bother about basics. Probably from some creative arts school. Bring back those far off days when architects had to do their time on the tools & in the trenches before they were let loose on a drawing board).

All this water was much more common when we first moved into the house, say 20 years ago. The bottom of the garden used to get very soggy most winters, so soggy that I was driven to install council slabs (on top of coarse sand) on the path to the compost heap at the very bottom of the garden - otherwise too much grief about mud on the kitchen floor after attending to the compost bucket. Slabs on sand have done well, not moving at all - perhaps because we then had 20 years without severe sog. Even so, better safe than sorry. Plus I had already banked the DIY brownie points.

PS: rain in Epsom slightly odd in that we seem to be in the rain shadow of the North Downs, blocking the rain from the south west. This often seems to mean that while there is rain in our general area, we don't get it in our particular area. Maybe with global warming, rain is now coming in from other directions...