Faits divers

I post an illustration of Epsom and Ewell's contribution to the flood scene, taken on 20th January, left. I am pleased to report that the situation has been unchanged since with the overflow from the Bourne Hall duck pond, if anything, looking a little larger this morning than it has done recently. A duck pond most famous for being just a couple of miles upstream of the place where Millais painted Ophelia.

Second fait is my irritation at reading in the Guardian that the Chief Executive of Shelter sees fit to bang on about how awful it is that the proportion of people living in a house which they rent from a mortgage company has fallen with respect the proportion who rent from a private landlord. I thought Shelter was to do with the plight of the homeless, not the mysteries of housing finance. My own take being that in lots of countries it is still normal to live in rented accommodation, to leave much of the bother of ownership to someone else.

Third and last fait is more irritation from the Guardian in the form of an (old) story about someone whose lawyers have extracted hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Health Service because he, because of the alleged failure of the Health Service to look after his sick brother properly, was able to witness (just that; no more, no less) the tail end of his brother, who has since died, beating their father to death. A tragedy, yes; the surviving brother needs help, yes. But beating up the Health Service and paying for large amounts of expensively and privately provided help no. Short of going back to banging up a large proportion of the people with mental health problems there are going to be tragedies from time to time, but I do not believe that this is the right way to respond to them.