By Philip Eden

Britain is waterlogged. Another sodden week has delivered rain daily to all parts of the country, and prolonged heavy downpours at either extremity - Cornwall and Caithness - have led to serious flooding. This November is poised to out-rain even that rainiest of recent Novembers, in 2000.

An exceptionally deep depression arrived in the southwest approaches on Wednesday 13th November, and in little more than 12 hours dropped 83mm of rain in Penzance, and between 50 and 75mm over the rest of Cornwall. With the ground already saturated there was nowhere for the water to drain, so it overtopped river banks, poured off the moors, and cascaded down the steep streets of St Ives. That most maritime of counties can experience flooding on at any season, but in south Cornwall this was probably the worst such episode for almost ten years.

The depression travelled northeast then north across the UK, taking its rain with it, but the rain-area stalled over northeast Scotland on Thursday night where it deposited around 50mm over large parts of Caithness, east Inverness-shire and Moray during a 48-hour long downpour; at Glenlivet 74mm fell. Several rivers in the region are still in full spate and serious flooding occurred in Elgin, but the catastrophic floods of September 1995 and June-July 1997 have not been repeated.

On October 13, at the end of the late-summer drought, I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph about how long dry spells come to an end: "on [some] occasions - and this appears to be one of them - the blocking high just shifts to another location further away and a large and complex area of low pressure settles over our part of the world. This is why many extended dry spells are followed by equally lengthy periods of very wet weather."

I could scarcely have imagined how well that statement would be illustrated by subsequent events. During August and September some parts of the country had had just one wet day in seven weeks. Since October 13 much of Wales and western Scotland have not had a single dry day, while even in habitually drier regions such as East Anglia you can count the rain-free days on the fingers of one hand. The total quantity of rain during that same period, averaged over the entire UK, has been exactly three times the normal amount, with as much as four and a half times in the Edinburgh and Aberdeen areas, the Isle of Man, and Pembrokeshire.

(c) Philip Eden