If I had a pound for every time my other half has gone fishing on a flooded street and asked me to film him from the bedroom window…
Alright, so that’s a new one on me, but Peterhead’s Sindi Sabalauska took that request in her stride when her boyfriend Liam Addison roped her into an amusing stunt which has now gone viral.
Sindi can be heard laughing off-camera as Liam sits in a camping chair on Catto Drive, fishing from the kerbside to the astonishment of passing motorists negotiating the flood waters.
The weather may be grim but at least we haven’t all lost our sense of humour.
There isn’t anything amusing about climate change, but as well as giving us a chuckle, Sindi’s video of Liam highlights the sort of extreme weather events we are seeing more and more, here and around the world.
Fishing on a Peterhead street is just part of the story
In recent days major flooding has devastated areas of South Asia, with rivers bursting their banks in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
This is monsoon season and so huge rainfall is expected, even depended upon, but the situation is worsening with each passing year.
China, Indonesia and South Korea have seen torrential downpours, and in Kenya, fatal floods have wrecked farms, fuelling debate about food security.
It sounds like a world away, but here in north and north-east Scotland, the same story is being played out, albeit with less intensity, for now.
BBC Scotland Weather estimated that almost a month’s worth of rain fell around Peterhead and Fraserburgh on Wednesday.
Roads were closed and buses and trains delayed or cancelled. Aberdeenshire Council warned of pressure on drainage systems and said stocks of sandbags could run out.
It’s July.
Meanwhile, in Monymusk, an artist hinted at a profound lesson about the natural world. He was explaining how he and his wife had become accidental topiarists.
It’s easily done. I became an accidental topiarist myself one night after a press awards do when I tripped into a hedge while holding a surprisingly sharp-edged trophy.
The metal statuette was of a hand holding a pen, as if in the middle of writing something, and was rather elegant, I thought.
Unfortunately, the pen became separated from the hand as it was dragged through the dense shrubbery.
The next day, looking like someone who had fallen through a hedge backwards because for once that’s quite literally what I’d done, I was too embarrassed to return to the scene to look for the pen.
Although the hand now made no sense as a trophy without it, I couldn’t face having to tell the neighbours why their privets had acquired a mysterious dent overnight.
The following year the newspaper I worked for at the time had to give the trophy back so it could be presented to the next recipients.
I wonder how puzzled they were to be handed what was essentially now just a metal claw after they scooped News Team of the Year.
Monymusk hedge wins its owners an award
But I digress. Back in Monymusk, David Hawson has been honoured in the Home Gardener Category at the Henchman’s inaugural Topiary Awards.
He said he and his wife Susie had never set out to become hedge designers when they decided to do away with a fence and plant three-inch yew saplings instead.
Having moved to the Aberdeenshire village 50 years ago, David said he had possessed “neither the intention nor the skill to do topiary”.
But over time, he and Susie noticed that parts of the hedge had started to resemble things, such as birds and sea creatures and they decided to gently nudge it along.
“It must have been around 25 years ago when I started to help what nature suggested,” said David.
Message from Mother Nature
In his case, it’s just one hedge, but imagine how different the world might be now if we’d all chosen to help with what Mother Nature suggested instead of so aggressively working against her?
Sure, we might have missed out on sights such as Liam Addison fishing in a Peterhead street for our amusement.
But by the same token we may have avoided the sort of worrying weather events that prompted such a spectacle in the first place.
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