batten down the hatches

You should be OK where you are anyway.

nods, that's about the only advantage to living in the Smoke: ambient air temperature is a couple of degrees warmer than surrounding country, so if we get heavy snow then iit's *really* heavy elsewhere. As well as being soft southereners, that is.

Hi Fran it as snowed since early hours friday morning and is still going .Its getting quite deep now.Wish for some sun now had enough of cold weather :))))

snowing in London - not much at the moment, small flakes drifint rather than driving, but it's settling on the plant troughs. If it's that cold here, it must be sub-Arctic everywere else.

I'll try to do a Sun Dance for you, Mark!

We have it here as well Fran, been snowing all morning, our gritters are good to us though and had been out last night so the roads are staying pretty clear locally, the wind is blowing it about. The sunshine is due to arrive here on Tuesday!!!!!!!!! LOL...

got the readio on now, just giving the weather report, things don't look much better over most of the country. Of course ,when all this snow melts suddenly ...

Yes we are lucky where we are, our fields and meadows get flooded but its very rarely it reaches the homes around here, I do feel for the people who live where the floods occur and apparently there are many spread across some areas without electricity...

Hi Fran ... stay safe and warm ...

intend to, TT! I'm looking for new accommodation in about five different counties, and I have the DEFRA flood risk map open while i'm looking at the lists; put in the postcode and see what risks there are locally. I can't believe that some places are built right on the edge of a river, literally a yrad or so away from it - the flood map shows the whole area as a sea of blue. lol I do'nt bid for those places!

lol... Sounds very sensible ..
I would not want to live too near water ...

me neither! lol I usually say that on a good day you're by the water, on a bad day you're in it.

I can JUST remember the Thames Flood of 1953 - my dad was giving me a piggyback down the street cos they wrre ankle deep in water. I must have been about a year old at the time.

Read up on it later and that was enough to make me vow never to move anywhere that I wasn't sure wouldn't be dry in "normal" flooding - those once-in-a-century events are getting more and more common.

"London's Drowning" by Antony Milne
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Londons-Drowning-Antony-Milne/dp/0423003909/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364061242&sr=1-2

I was born & grew up in London during the fifties & first half of the 60. I can't remember ever having experienced flooding but I seem to have very vague & imprecise memories of the tube being flooded & reading posters warning of the flood prone areas of the city.

Around here we have regular flooding of the river Ouse but it never gets into town & I've never heard of anyone being affected by flooding here.

I have a recurring dream/nightmare of trying to get to work but being impeded by flood waters. Probably comes from the 5 years I had to cross the river twice a day 5 days a week to get to work. Sometimes the river would be in flood & the fields around would be under water. They built a ring road around the town during the years I was in Spain & built a park alongside the river. The road is a good metre above the river in some places & helps to keep the river from getting into the town centre.

It has a lot of room to expand so there's never any flooding here. Have you seen my photos of a white wooden bridge over the Brook where it flows into the river? When the river floods the bridge ends up being in the middle of the river!

We lived in Plaistow then, which was fairly low-lying but well away from the river, though there might have been some backing up from smaller rivers that flow into the Thames.

It didn't worry me so much when I lived on the 7th floor, but now I'm down to ground level it's a bit more immediate. Oh, I know that this end of Tower Hamlets is on higher ground than the riverside bits, but high tides are getting higher as England tilts to the south (apparently the enormous weight of Nordic ice kept that part of the tectonic plate depresed, but now that's melting, the northern part is rising and so the south is sinking - think they said about a centimetre a year.)

Rivers are getting so crowded, and their courses are getting so confined - one reason the Thames will never freeze over as it used to is that it's now so confined that the current is much to fast to let ice form.

There was a programme on "the Easter Floods" that i videod - must have been ages ago, since I've not watched TV since 1999 - the power of rivers is awesome, even under normal conditions; when rivers break their banks or overtop them they're unstoppable.

And the govt is not only allowing but encouraging new developments of entire new towns on known flood plains! i hope the buyers check their flood insurance.