Rainy Day Tuesday

Today, it rained. The garden reached its thirsty hands to the sky and drank it in, but the streets rejected the downpour. The thin film of oil and other, less savoury, substances allowed the water to just slip off the streets and made walking treacherous. Once more, the problems London suffers when it doesn’t rain regularly were there, in palpable form, beneath our feet.

If our climate really is getting hotter and dryer, as it often seems it is, then we need to look again at how we clean the streets of this city. It only takes a few days without rain and the city becomes increasingly rank each day, as the sun beats down on the litter on the streets. I’ve mentioned before how impressed I was with the street cleaning in Barcelona, and how efficiently they kept the streets of that hot, dry city clean and pleasant smelling.

The time is coming when we might have to take a leaf from their book.