WHISPERING SMITH: water, water, everywhere

The clue is in the words.

Think about it. The problem will not go away and the unpredictable will become even more predictable. The Angmering happening is not new and folk were assured after the last deluge that it wouldn’t happen again. It did, and it had happened in the past.

It will happen again in LA and the surrounding area and that is perfectly predictable. We cannot continue to flood the open spaces and wetlands with houses, concrete and Tarmac and expect the predictably unpredictable not to happen. Nature used to help take care of such events but engineers, it seems, cannot.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP It has been said that LA is a bit of a ghost hotspot. To be honest, I don’t believe in ghosts or the after-life – although the latter would be nice – and things that go bump in the night are usually just that!

However, the other night my bedroom door started to rattle and, as the windows were tightly closed, I thought it might be something other than the wind, so I got out of bed and wedged a Lloyd Loom chair under the doorknob.

When I related the incident to my son the following morning, he looked at me in that quizzical, patient way young men sometimes give their aged parents – usually when explaining how a pc works – and suggested that, if a spirit had crossed over from the other side, wandered through mysterious portals and unworldly dimensions, was it very likely that a wicker chair wedged under a doorknob would halt his or her progress?

Uhmm… There is so much, Horatio, about which we know so little.

COME FLY WITH ME Went up on to Highdown last week, to watch my mate fly his radio-controlled glider. It soared like an eagle and waltzed around the sky midst a pair of buzzards, a red kite, seagulls and a kestrel, lifted by the thermals generated by the new ASDA and the Haskins Garden Centre.

On the way back to the car park he picked up four discarded little plastic bags of dog poo from the grass and bushes and dumped them in the proper receptacle.

Very civic-minded, these ground-bound glider pilots!

DOOMED Obesity, scientists claim, is threatening the environment and will eventually result in the death of the Earth.

I could take on the scenario of a doomed, hot world, swallowed by pollution and foul air or done in by nuclear holocaust, or even a world drowned in its own water, but I never foresaw us eating the planet to death, and it seems that we may well be in the process of doing just that.

Ah, well, bon appetit, Earthlings, I am off, back home to Alpha Centauri!