Joe Bennett: Heavy rain and flood sparks musings on the places we inhabit

Recent heavy rain and a flooded driveway got Joe Bennett thinking.

OPINION:

The first serious rain for a while and everything is sodden after a night of it pattering on the roof like the feet of a thousand birds.

And I emerge bleary in the morning to fetch the paper and the expanse of concrete at the top of the drive is flooded and because I know things that no one else on earth knows I do not worry and I do not swear, indeed I am, despite the bleariness, pleased, because, well, you will see.

I step barefoot into the clamminess of gumboots and I hoist a functional but damaged umbrella (a phrase that describes, in my experience, most umbrellas, nearly all of them having at least one stoved-in rib, one lame or broken wing, that spoils the tautened mushroom of the brolly perfect) and thus protected I step out under the blanket of clouds in highish spirits. For not only do I know things, I am also Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for ever. When he reached the top he was powerless to stop it rolling back down, whereupon he had no choice but to follow it down and start again. But Camus argued Sisyphus was a happy man.

Sisyphus, said Camus, always had a task at hand, something hard but doable, that led to a sense of achievement when he succeeded, followed by a little thinking time and recreation while he walked back down the mountain to start over. What man could ask for more? How different, indeed, is that from the life most of us choose to lead, with repetitive work filling the week, followed by a little playtime at the weekend.

Sisyphus perished several thousand years ago and Camus in the year I was born, but the truths they enshrined endure.

The third policeman in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman spends so much time on his bicycle that molecules of bicycle find their way into his system while the bike in turn absorbs molecules of policeman. In time, the two become almost indistinguishable, with the bike increasingly independent of mind and the policeman increasingly mechanical.

So it is with the places we inhabit. We rub along and become if not one, yet closely intermingled and involved. I have lived in this house for more than a quarter of my life and I am the world expert on it and the land that surrounds it. There are none better informed. And over the years, like any beast, I have adjusted to fit my habitat, and I have adjusted my habitat to fit me.

So I know, for example, like the veins on the hand of a lover, the network of drains on this hillside, many of which I have caused to be dug or built, and when I see the flooded concrete I know with unerring certainty the points of choke where they'll be blocked to cause this little flood. And I go straight there, slop slopping in my gumboots, driving a wake ahead of me through the lakelet, the rain dancing tiptoe on my brolly.

And at the bottom end of a long retaining wall built to replace one lost in the earthquakes I reach down through the cold brown water, and sink my fingers as deep down the pipe as they can reach, then clench them round the plug of leaves and twigs and gunk - what tool on earth, what single man-made tool, could even approximate a move of such complexity? - and ease back out, and the plug, the wad, comes out as one and I fling it over the wall and even as I do so the grateful water dives down and away, answers the call of its only master, and goes on its way to the sea.

Is there a better household task than unblocking a drain? It's sexual in its gratification, its clearing of the pathways of the mind.

The second blockage further up involves a chicane of piping installed by a man unworthy of the name of drain-layer. It is so ill-designed that a mouse's corpse will catch in it, and once a single corpse has stuck it's an eternal verity of drainage that others come to join it.

And sure enough the blockage had backed up above the chicane like a beaver's lodge, a mass of twigs and grass and unidentified detritus that has gathered in the drain throughout the drought of summer.

I sink the miracle-working hand again and haul out wads and sodden bundles, until with a noise that brings to mind pneumonia, the blockage clears, the water runs and Sisyphus goes down the drive a damp but happy man to fetch the paper.