(This is re-cycling, written in drought year,1976, I was 41).

It all started with beer and socks. All the males drink beer instead of eating. I hate beer, so I have some Spanish red and lemonade and am getting systematically sloshed to forget the sun. How silly can you get? This weather I wash 42 pairs of socks a week – there should be personal colours, but two boys have the same colour and fouled the system. I have yet to wash an even number of socks, one lurks in the laundry basket, under the bed, or in a trouser leg.

The wine is taking a hold, so perhaps explanations needed before becoming paralytic. I am sitting where most people would envy me, outside a 250 year old farmhouse with my faithful Labrador at my feet and the sunset on a lovely view. So what is wrong? I am a farmer. Our pastures are as brown as Spain or Sicily, cabbages flattened by heat, hawthorn hedge dying, trees dropping their leaves because they cannot get enough water, and the corn has ripened before it has filled out.

Tonight is perhaps a climax leading to rebellion; the 16th day with temperatures over 85 degrees. We have a meeting of market gardeners in the house. They are all exhausted, battling with irrigation, no time or energy for other diversions, no day off. I decide that as a good wife I will do everything to smooth my husband’s path and reduce the stress factor as much as I can. Then I do a Jekyll and Hyde and wish and wish for a conversation on politics, art, literature, morals, new films, anything, but anything that can have no bearing on the water shortage.

But I know that if I go near my non-farming friends I shall bore them to death with our problems. I have become totally irrational. I had a meeting in London and spent my time feeling sorry for commuters in crowded trains, while I spent the day literally stuck to a hot chair in a hot room to discuss the Common Market. Then I reverse my sympathies and scorn the nine to fivers while we rush daughters to parties, and then check over-heating machinery. I castigate the non-caring executive basking on his terrace beside his swimming pool and the BBQ while I get a scratch meal at 10 p.m then find the girls’ school dresses are not ironed. Then I think of people in high rise flats, spending hours in queues to get to coast or country.

Euphoria has set in with the wine. The Labrador has a revolting bone, the budgie is chirping, the cat supine, Ermintrude the hen is selecting sultanas from some cole slaw, and the fan-tailed pigeons sit on our knees to be fed. Another glass of wine and I may convince myself that we are not going broke this year after all. Two more glasses and I won’t care. 

The Gardener

A Moodscope member