Athy

Ditto - bearing in mind the frequency with which we used the hose to water the garden last year, I'm pleased that we haven't got a water meter.

What surprised me, reading that, wasn that the other joint hottest year was 2018. 1976 was drier, but evidently not as hoty. Knowing our British weather, it's probably too much to hope for more of the same this year - so far, temperatures have probably been below average.

Fairy nuff. While last summer was warm and dry, with a few very hot days, as it exceptionally so? The best summer I can remember was that of 1976, which was gorgeous and seemed to go on for ever; I'm unsure if 2022 beat it. I also remember the temperature reaching 100F one day in the early 2000s. That probably was an extreme weather event, as I don't recall that summer being exceptional in other ways.

They are, though, closely related. So, the annual rainfall in a particular area doesn't affect the amount of water in its rivers? I find that hard to believe.

That's very interesting, David, thank you. I'm not sure about "increased rainfall intensity" though. According to the internet, 2012 waqs the wettest year this century, so it has actually decreased since then. Incidentally, the same chart shows 2010 as being the century's driest year, though I don't remember it as being particularly parched.

Duplicate post I think - you had posted this already. I note that, despite your apparent expertise, you haven't given us the Easter forecast yet. Come on, step lively now. It took them 200 years to find out?

Thank you for your kind words. No, I am not a meteorologist. You obviously are, so perhaps you'd let us all know if it will be raining over the Easter weekend.

Thanks for that information. Alan's posts are often a good source of waterways news, but I thought that he usually wrote them himself. Hmm. So, droughts, storms and heavy rain are recent inventions? I rather think that our canals were built to withstand such conditions.

One assumed incorrectly. Readers don't open a web site linkm before reading the topic title!

Ah, I see. There was no indication that the topic title was a quotation, rather than of your own invention, hence my comment.

CARTs assertion that canals are "increasingly vulnerable to the threat of cliomate change" is surely specious. Are they suggesting that canals haven't got hotter in the summer and colder in the winter over the last 200 or so years? What do you mean by "Calans like the K&A"? Are you suggesting different licence fees for different canals?

One fervently hopers so. A few years ago I had a Springer whose shallow-V bottom turned out to be fillds with unidentifiable pieces of scrap metal.

We subscribed to both the major boatimags for years, but last year we didn't renew our subscriptions when they became due. I do enjoy the magazine formet - three or four mags, principally music- and railway-related, arrive here each month. But I found that I was enjoying CB and WW less. This could be because for me two of the key features were the canal of the month and the new boat test. Regarding the former, there are only so many canals to write about and they don't change that much over the years, so by the time the Morth Oxford, for example, was featured, I felt that I'd read it all before en and five years ago. For the latter, the boats tested seemed latterly to lack variety, a dreary procession of 57' Tyler Wilson shells with reverse layouts, corian (what is that?) work tops and Beta 43 engines. Oh, and every boat they tested was apparently wonderful (and offering great value at just £120,000), an aspect probably not unconnected with the full page advert taken out by the builder. So, we found that as we read each issue we were getting a sense of déja vu, and we felt that we'd vu'd enough.

That's a non sequitur and, since this alleged post has been deleted, it doesn't exist and therefore there is no case to answer. I will ask you for a second time to refrain from such inflammatory posting.

I don't think I shall. But I will ask you not to refer to other members in those terms, please, unless of course it's a joke.

A quite good human interest story, I thought. Who is this "libeller"?