AS well as making rivers rise, drains overflow, roads impassable, and grown men weep at the sheer horror of it all, Wednesday’s deluge stopped play on football pitches, golf courses, and park playgrounds across the country.

A case in point was the popular playground in Swan Meadows that was still flooded on Thursday morning when the Chronicle popped by for a casual swing.

As you can see from the picture, things were more than a little treacherous underfoot, and any swinging session was off the cards until things were a little less wet and wild.

As we were busy snapping pictures and pondering the strange and unique kind of hell that is British weather, an elderly passer-by who is inexplicably smoking tobacco from a pipe as opposed to flavoured chemicals from a vape, exclaimed, “I blame the bloody council!”

Although experience has often taught us it is usually wise to blame local authorities when things go wrong, on this occasion it would perhaps be a little beyond the pale to hold them accountable for the adverse effects of climate change.

The passer-by, who was also wearing a t-shirt with ‘Heat or eat?’ emblazoned upon it, continued, “If they had put a splash park installed in Swan Meadows instead of a playground that nobody uses except underage drinkers then this wouldn’t have happened.”

When quizzed about what splash park he was referring to, the passer-by became a little agitated and roared, “The splash park is not the point! The point is that this playground floods year after year and the council fails to do anything about it.”

After triumphantly making a point that we failed to understand, the red-faced gentleman continued, “Of course, in my day, it would take more than a little water to have stopped our fun. Oh, the pranks we would have had as kids with a little makeshift pond like this. If we weren’t busy making rafts or playing pirates and trying to drown one another, we’d be skimming stones or racing frogs to the point of exhaustion. And quite often you’d find us singing in the rain!”