Dry Plain

One of the most persistent myths about England, and there are quite a few, is that it always rains here. That might be true for Manchester or the Lake District, but certainly not for the south of the country, and more specifically the capital. It is generally much drier here than in the Netherlands. That is not surprising, as London is located much further south. The idea that it ‘always rains’ in England is a completely wrong assessment this summer. The last rainfall was somewhere in mid-June.

Just how dry it is was illustrated by a photo that appeared in The Daily Telegraph last week. A photo, mind you, of my ‘front yard’, as I sometimes call Blackheath. It shows a bone-dry plateau, with my church on it. It is not for nothing that All Saints’ Blackheath portrays itself as “The Church on the Heath”. Chinese couples regularly come to use the church, dating back to 1857, as a backdrop for their wedding photos. Now, the church stands in the foreground of a drought photo.

Virtually all of the ‘green and pleasant land’ has disappeared, except in the football, tennis, and cricket stadiums. Recently, I flew over East England to the Netherlands. Below me, I saw the endless yellow-brown fields of Suffolk. What a difference from my homeland, where everything was green. There could be several reasons for this: different grass, farmers who do spray, better irrigation, or the simple fact that the west of the Netherlands (photo below) lies largely below sea level.

Back to Blackheath, where our priest, Father Nicholas, viewed the photo with interest. He is trying to convince the Lewisham district not to grant permission for a food and music festival, organised by Radioactive Clothing Ltd, on Guy Fawkes night in early November. During the last commemoration, the grass was severely damaged. The drought photo, with the black patches near the church, serves as a sad illustration of this.

It is literally a ‘black heath’.