Wayland waylaid

I had plans for this afternoon. I was going to take the car out to White Horse Hill and Wayland's Smithy, not visited for a couple of years now, but once the target of many a SocA pilgrimage. I would take my camera, and take moody pictures of the Smithy under a lachrymose sky. Unfortunately, the sky was rather too lachrymose, and driving to the National Trust car park on White Horse Hill was akin to driving up through a stream against the current; hardier and better-prepared walkers than I were huddled together in the car park, evidently their sturdy waterproofs were not sturdy enough in the face of what had become a downpour of monsoon proportions, and winds of Beaufortian ambition. So I failed to do the healthy and active walking I had planned, as I had not the company needed for adverse conditions (and this was worse than the weather I faced with a SocT party in Cumbria two years ago) and instead drove around south-west Oxfordshire, through roads often under a couple of inches of water, and past spontaneous village fountains erupting where the flooded drains were bursting through their covers.