LOL! In Manchester, I'm the only person who ever puts her headlights on when it rains because, to everyone else, that's normal visibility. (Sometimes, the rain stops and the sun comes out, and that's super-high visibility).

No. It isn't. It really isn't.

So if you spent your childhood thinking a Biblical flood was commonplace and ongoing, it must have been a great disappointment never to catch sight of all those matched pairs of animals that were presumably constantly heading off towards some Ark or another.

Any society that had systems in place that would allow Noah to track down two, and just two*, of every species of animal alive, and ensure that they all arrived at the correct place at the correct time, and were adequately fed and housed in ways that meant they didn't eat each other, and only had two fleas between them, was obviously capable of serious planning. But maybe that was the problem; all their organisational energies went into animal wrangling, and none into flood readiness. They were probably too busy transporting lemurs to even get round to inventing umbrellas.

* I remembered from QI that certain animals (edible ones?) were taken onto the ark in numbers greater than 2, and went to check this fact. My entire first page of results was full of serious and earnest discussions about ark logistics by people who believe every word is true. It was all quite amusing, but entirely distracted me from my original quest.

There is a at least one other ark, according to children's book called, not surprisingly, The Other Ark. There were too many animals to fit into Noah's ark, so he asked his friend to take all the kangadoodledoos and hippogiraffes the like. It's all quite confusing, though. I'd assumed the ark of exotic animals would meet some hideous disaster, thus explaining why there are no kangadoodledoos today, but all that happens is that Noah's friend takes so long organising things, that the flood recedes before he finishes, leaving them all alive and well on dry land. Which kind of raises the question of why the whole ark thing was necessary in the first place.

Unfortunately there weren't any books to hand this morning, when I was reading LJ on my phone while sitting on a stone step on the sea front, waiting for the floating bridge to turn.

It rains a lot in Denley Moor:



"It were always rainin' in Denley Moor, except on days when it were fine; and there weren't many of those - not if you include drizzle as rain. And even if it weren't drizzling, it were overcast and there were a lot of moisture in the air. You'd come home as though it had been rainin', even though there had been no evidence of precipitation in the rain gauge outside the town hall."

- Eric Olthwaite