Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
A few weeks ago there were extensive floods in Sheffield, Hull and other areas in the north Midlands. Last Friday there was heavy rain over most of the south of England and it moved slowly over Hampshire into Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and then Wales. The rain over Wales has now come down the Rivers Avon and Severn and completely flooded Evesham and Tewkesbury several feet deep and cut off roads into the Towns.
 




Oxford and Pangbourne had flash floods from rainfall last Friday which have gone down but now the River Thames is rising due to the volume of water coming from Gloucestershire and more flooding is expected. The Severn and Avon are expected to reach their peak early tomorrow morning and it is still raining.

Reports often say that the flooding is "unprecedented" but other reports say that the River Severn and Avon, which meet at Tewkesbury, had floods about as bad in 1947. Since then there has been increased building on flood plains and we now have climate change. This has made the jet stream move south from Iceland over the last few months and we have inclement weather due to low pressure volatile storms which have moved over the land very slowly while southern Europe has a heat wave and drought.

 
It's interesting to look at my website statistics and see what viewers have done. In the list of key search phrases I noticed the following:-
brigitte Nielsen
mensa mensa mensam
january 1978 chinese snake
broken ladder pictures

The "broken ladder pictures" search would have shown one of me in Jakarta after I had cleared a roof outlet blockage and the old bamboo ladder collapsed under me, but what a strange thing to search for! I tried the same search phrase in Google but my website did not show on the first twenty pages of listings so someone must have searched many more pages to get to my site.

The Brigitte Nielsen search could be someone looking for pornographic pictures. I showed a photo of her in a shower at the Big Brother House with one of the male contestants, not a pornographic photo.

Mensa mensa mensam - another strange search phrase. I was describing my early schooldays.

In the listing files with at least 20 requests I noticed that some pages had been looked at only the day before but related to forum answers I had given months before and should have been long forgotten. Perhaps Google or some other robot was checking all my pages. Similarly there were many pages viewed the previous day including many of my early musings pages relating to 2003 and 2004, I can't believe that a person could be systematically reading all my pages the same day, so it must be some computer program. This gives a distorted view. I know that one of my stats programs excludes robots and spiders but the one I have just referred to obviously does not.

It's also interesting that between 1am and 6am the views are about 20% of the average for the rest of the day and I can't believe that robots account for all of them, but I suppose it would be possible if robots looked at every page.

The Analog stats show about 100 pages visited for each hour between midnight and 6am but 300 to 500 for each hour during the day. These are Analyzed requests from Tue, Jan 23 2007 at 7:02 AM to Fri, Jul 13 2007 at 8:11 AM (171.05 days).

Awstats shows 4, 0, 1, 7, 9, 6 and 1 pages for the hours midnight to 7am and varying numbers between 1 and 53 for the other hours, namely 13, 20, 8, 9, 53, 51, 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 3, 16, 12, 7, 15 and 3 from 7am to midnight. This shows high viewing between 11am and 1pm. These are for the month (two weeks so far). They are very different on average from the Analog stats. During May and June the pages viewed were about six times as much, or three times as much on a full month basis.