Green or Obscene my latest mileage

Miles in car: -66
Miles being driven: -10
Miles by bike: 0
Miles by bus: 0
Miles by train: +449
Miles by foot: +107
Total: +480 (running total +314)

It's good to get back into positive territory again having taken weeks to work off those miles in the car around Easter and the bank holidays on trips. And it's even better to have a great holiday without having to use a car apart from a lift back to the railway station.

Me and my dad had a great walk through Lincolnshire on the Viking Way, enjoying the countryside, lovely villages, flora and fauna and great pubs serving great food and real ale! We had great views of hares and barn owls, Spitfire and Hurricane, rock rose and campion.

What's more we felt fitter and healthier after it all.

The trains to and from the start of the walk were cheap and ran smoothly and comfortably except for flooding of a tunnel between Doncaster and Wakefield caused by last week's heavy rain. Even then GNER organised a replacement and the train certainly took the strain of a return trip to south Lincolnshire.

With global warming predicted to increase the likelihood of such heavy storms, it was interesting to look at how the nation coped with the flash flooding.

Not very well, of course, was the answer as with the majority of extreme (and even not so extreme) weather. That sort of disruption and the costs involved in improving infrastructure to cope underline how imperative it is that we nip climate change in the bud before it gets any worse let alone stopping it spiral out of control.

To alleviate the effects of such cloudbursts, we have to get away from our obsession with treating all our watercourses as drains to get the rain away as quickly as possible. All that does is overload the sewerage system which wasn't designed by the Victorians to cope with the population and all the run-off it now has to.

Instead, we should be shepherding our water resources and letting the environment take the strain. That includes making use of the natural sponges of bog and marsh and letting the land soak up the rain by stopping up drains on the moors (cutting their release of CO2 at the same time), planting more trees by watercourses, letting our rivers spill out on to their natural floodplains and not covering so much of the land with concrete and Tarmac.

Even the Minoan civilisation on Crete thousands of years ago built their drains in zig-zags so the water wouldn't build up a destructive force. We seem to have forgotten all the old management techniques in our rush for drainage, drainage, drainage.

Slowing the water up instead will replenish our natural aquifers, restore wonderful wildlife habitats and mean we are not so overwhelmed when the deluges come.