Shropshire Star comment: Weather been another test of resilience
For week after week during the height of the lockdown the weather played its little trick.
After the terrible and disastrous floods at the beginning of the year, May was the driest and sunniest on record. Generally the weather teased us and tempted us at a time when we were told to stay indoors and avoid all but the most necessary of journeys.
For those with gardens, it wasn't too bad, as you could at least get out to get a bit of fresh air and sunshine. For those without a garden it was misery piled upon misery, looking out on a pleasant but forbidden world.
You only have to look what happened at some of the beaches to see the pent up desire among ordinary people to get out, even at potential health risk to themselves and others.
And now we are in June and for some unlucky folk the floods have made an unwelcome return. If you were caught up in one of the torrential downpours of the past few days you will have known about it. It was like monsoon rain, rain to overwhelm the drains, and to turn brooks and streams into raging torrents.
At a time when there has been renewed talk about flood defences, it was a reminder that it is not always the big rivers like the River Severn which are the culprits. When the heavens open in the summer you can get flooding in a whole new constituency of places, or as they have sadly found out at Dale End at Coalbrookdale, at the same places but from a different source or direction.
This has been a cruel twist to those who were hit earlier in the year, then hit by the coronavirus clampdown, and now hit again just as the country is tentatively trying to emerge from the lockdown by easing restrictions sufficiently to get economic activity going again.
If at the start of the year you had advised businesses to prepare for the unexpected, it would have been reasonable, but in the end not helpful, because we now know that they would really have needed to prepare for the unprecedented.
Floods, pandemic, thunder, lightning. It's a test for the resilience of British businesses the like of which we have never seen.