What a difference a year made!

Last summer, when we went to UK for Cheng’s convocation, the weather was so hot at around 38 degrees that the older buildings and cars were found to be wanting without air-conditioning. Bringing along sweaters and jackets seemed out of place.

This year, the temperature was generally between 15 and 20 degrees, with frequent drizzles, while certain parts of UK like Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire and Sheffield were extensively flooded. An electricity sub-station serving half a million people, had to be manually surrounded with sand-bags to prevent outage. There was ‘water, water, everywhere and not a drop to spare’ in terms of drinking water. Human greed reared its ugly head when a supermarket spokesman said he noticed all his bottles of water snapped up early in the morning and later sold at GBP5 per bottle outside his store! The government had to step in by providing millions of bottles of drinking water.