A dam fun piece of work

Attention all psychology-wallahs, chinstroking analysts, couch-adjacent pokeskulls. I want you to explain something. My subject is drains. I live on the side of a hill where the bellbirds chime, the fantails flutter and the harriers soar. But the nub of the place, as I’ve learned over years, is the drains.

When the rains come, the water pours off the hill in torrents and will get to the sea one way or another. A drain is a good way. Any other way isn’t.

My greenhouse has a summer floor of baked clay.

But in winter the rain seeps in and turns it to the battlefield of the Somme. So last summer I hired a drainlayer to drain it. He turned out to be a former pupil.

In the 25 years since I taught him English he’s laid drains by the thousand and prospered. He now has a truck with his name and slogan on the side, impeccably spelt and punctuated.

It is always good to watch a master of a trade, one who is at ease in his vocation. So I admired the practised way he selected a long-handled shovel from a rack on his truck and leant on it while his apprentice dug.

It was too hot, however, to watch work for long, so I took my former pupil on a sight-seeing tour of my demesnes. I pointed out the fluttering fantails, the chiming bellbirds, the soaring harriers. But a sight-seeing drainlayer looks down not up. ‘‘Tut,’’ he said, pointing at a half-blocked culvert, ‘‘tut and tut again. You need to get that cleared.’’

There’s a pleasure in being told off by a former pupil. ‘‘Sorry,’’ I said, ‘‘I’ll get it done, I promise.’’

But it was a schoolboy promise, spoken only to appease. I spoke and I forgot. Forgot, that is, until this last weekend when the big rains came. Sunday morning I opened the curtains on a lake.

T