Floods? No, they won't affect me. Or so say those of us who don't live anywhere near a river, stream or ditch containing a sad excuse for a beck. Yet 24 hours later we awake to find a raging torrent coursing its way from the living room to the kitchen.

What none of us had reckoned on was the drains - full to bursting point, then spilling over into the streets and under our doors.

My parents live on top of a hill. The village stream, which broke its banks during last weekend's downpour, is at the bottom.

Yet still they were flooded, when the drains on the high street could take no more.

Fortunately, my family home escaped relatively unscathed, although I needed a pair of waders to get to my car, parked in a lake-like puddle in the road outside.

In Britain, the weather has always been a talking point, with the age-old questions regularly asked: "Do you remember the harsh winter of 1947, the scorching summer of 1976, or the Great Storm of 1987?"

Yet, the way things are going, such severe climatic conditions will become so much the norm that future conversations will be along the lines of: "Did you know my chimney blew down in the storm?"

"Really? Was that the one last Monday, Tuesday or Friday?"

Joking apart, this change of climate is frightening stuff.

Driving to work, so much of the countryside is under water that it's not difficult to imagine how the entire island could be submerged.

Then, in times of drought (which are bound to be ten times worse than that of 1976), familiar buildings would poke eerily through the water like those submerged churches that suddenly pop out of reservoirs in long, dry summers.

The entire country is, I believe, at risk from global warming.

We have got to remember that it's not only rainfall that is bringing all this unwanted water, but melting ice caps.

It will take more than a few sandbags to fend off the oceans.

We should take a much greater responsibility for our planet right now.

Yet people seem more concerned with learning to live with the current situation, than in trying to stop it getting worse.

A news item last week was decidedly upbeat, telling viewers that a warmer climate would not be all bad. It let us grow crops more suited to Mediterranean countries, such as olives and peppers (while those countries will be reduced to desert and unable to grow anything), and we probably wouldn't have to put anti-freeze in our cars in winter.

Great! We can all save 50p a year on a tub of anti-freeze, while having to save three times our salaries to pay household and buildings insurance.

Well, with flooding every other week and hurricanes once a month, we'll be subjected to an endless round of repairs and redecoration.

The most watched television programmes will be Drying Rooms and Home Front In The River.

Things will, almost certainly, get worse. We might end up having to live with giant tidal waves and tornadoes that suck up double-decker buses.

But, whatever hits us, nothing will persuade us to give up our beloved cars - said to be the main cause of global warming.

Still, it gives us something to talk about.

With our local floods flashing up on national telly every night, we have had more calls from supposedly long-lost friends and relatives than ever before.