Without a shadow of a drought

I am essentially rather cold-blooded – I’m always fairly chilly and need a constant application of heat, like an exotic lizard or a Greggs sausage roll. In fact lolling under a bright lamp with assorted pastries sounds like a lovely way to pass the time.

Which is to say that I’m enjoying the current weather – the sunshine and the balmy temperatures are a treat. And also a doom-laden sigh of the impending collapse of the natural world, but I don’t think there’s too much tension is recognising that the two things can be true at once.

I’d quite like a spot of rain though – if it’s not too much trouble – for not much other reason than I’m sick of going round the vegetable patches with a watering can. Filling the thing up from the outside tap is playing havoc with my lower back and I keep getting bits of the outside stuck in my feet. Unfortunately every time I look at the weather forecast the damp conditions get further and further away. We may already be in a dessicated state, which is a troublesome fall for a country that wields its inclement weather as a core personality trait.

Not that I understand the weather. It might say 30% chance of rain for the day, but then 60% chance of rain within a given hour. This time it feels like there is a significant amount of tension in considering the two things to be simultaneously true.

I fundamentally can’t maths, if you have four hours with a 30% chance of rain that’s 120% chance of rain is it not? Impossible to stay dry and no point leaving the house. But even if there was only 10% chance of rain in the day and it actually does rain, in retrospect you would have to say that it was a 100% chance of rain. For a fundamentally binary choice – it’s either raining or it isn’t – you’d be as well just flipping a coin. You’d have to be right some time, wouldn’t you? What would be the chances…