AS I write this at lunchtime on Friday, November 8 I am looking out at the River Mint at the bottom of my garden, glinting in the sunshine and gurgling happily, well in its channel.

On my radio The World at One is reporting live from South Yorkshire; torrential rain is falling there and, as I write, the River Don has just burst into homes last washed out in 2007. A woman has just been swept away and drowned in Darley Dale, Derbyshire.

Just over 100 miles separate my Mintside idyll from the horrors happening concurrently in Yorkshire and Derbyshire. A mere flap of the proverbial "butterfly's wing somewhere in Peru" determined that this particular Atlantic Low dropped its deadly load to our south rather than, as for example in December 2015, over South Lakeland. The fickle finger of weather fate will, you can be sure, soon visit such an event on us again. As our climate system changes and evolves, such events will become more frequent.

It is with great sadness that I detect an insensitivity among some influential local groups to the real, life-changing, even life-threatening horror that being flooded out brings. I am referring to what appears to me to be an emerging caucus of official, semi-official and self-appointed groups who seem to be working behind the scenes with the apparent aim to frustrate, delay and, ultimately, make void the democratically agreed flood defence plans for the Kent catchment. The Friends of the Lake District, the Open Spaces Society, the Civic Society have variously made vexatious applications and objections to stop progress on Kendal's riverside defences and the Gooseholme bridge (e.g. Gazette, November 7, 'Bridge plan hits troubled waters'). Organised groups made representation at the recent Kendal Vision meetings to re-write the agreed Environment Agency flood defence plan, and now a group calling itself Save Our Rivers has been given a slot at the Kendal Mountain Festival to put into question Phase 3 of the scheme, the upstream storage essential to give 1-in-100-year protection to well over 1,000 homes, businesses and the infrastructure of our town and villages (Save our Rivers hosts a discussion about natural flood management - the dam alternative, on November 14).

I would ask all of these groups and individuals who don't like the scheme for the Kent to examine their motives for their actions against it. Facts dictate they have no reasonable technical grounds to question what the Environment Agency experts propose; facts that have been refined and debated in every appropriate democratic arena and stand up to the scrutiny of independent experts. It is personal aesthetic preferences that are at the root of most of the objections I have seen expressed.

Think of what South Yorkshire and Derbyshire folk are experiencing as I write... just what so many of us experienced in 2015 and many times before that. Are your aesthetic preferences really so important as to wish to inflict that on us again?

Ian Kell

Mealbank