You see, you watch the weather forecast, hoping for a bit of rain here and there, because that way you don’t have to lug about your watering can, or unwind the hose and then rewind the hose in order that your vegetables do not fall down dead just when you’ve got everyone into the groove of eager anticipation at the next harvest weight every time your blog lights up in their feed reader, but then the rain goes right ahead and takes liberties.

Instead of just a little watering here and there, perhaps just at night even, so you can lie in bed and enjoy the sound of it on the conservatory roof, it rains and rains and rain and rains and then, in case you’d had your curtains drawn for a few days and had missed it, it rains some more just to be on the safe side.

And the vegetables are all, yay, water, we know what to do with that, nom, nom, nom, biological process, biological process. Not the tomatoes though. No, tomatoes are wily creatures that come indoors at night and read gardening books for kicks. They quietly turn the pages until they reach the part with the title “Tomato Troubles” and then they study. They study the words and the pictures and then creep back into the garden to tell their tomato friends what they learned inside the big house.

“Dudes,” they say, for I have grown the most hip and happening vegetables, “Dudes, all this yummy rain is the perfect excuse to turn black and drop dead! No, really! Droop, no longer look merry! Let those fruits hang to the ground. For this is the way to get indoors right now – and indoors? Indoors they have television.”