GIVE US A CUE!

The tables are turned on sun-loving Kate

This is a time of year when my husband really lets us know we are landowners. He starts to fret about the rain – or lack of it. He’ll stare at the forecast online and shake his head in the manner of a drought-ravaged disgruntled farmer. “Not good,” he’ll utter.

“What’s not good?” I ask. “The weather,” he replies. “The weather? It’s amazing!” I reply, looking at the beaming, gleaming sunshine.

“Nope, not good for the paddocks,” he replies.

“Great for the kids, though!” I quip as I watch my daughter skip through her homemade waterslide on the lawn. “Nope,” he replies resolutely. And it’s not a bit of drizzle he’s happy with either. If the odd rain cloud hovers above and drops fragmented amounts on the grass, he still shakes his head.

“Look! Rain!” I’ll enthuse, pointing at a few drips. “Not enough,” he’ll mumble. He wants tropical-storm style rain. Non-stop rain. Everyone’s worst summer nightmare rain, basically.

So he becomes largely absent from the house for the majority of the summer. He’s outside, hose in hand, watering pots, flower beds, plants … and turning on lawn sprinklers and irrigation hoses. Luckily, he finds this activity enjoyable and we don’t begrudge his absence from the house. Someone muttering about how it’s not raining is a bit of a downer when you’re trying to enjoy your summer holiday, so we happily leave him to it.

But the other thing he did this year was purchase a snooker table. A “lifelong dream”, he told me. So when he’s not out hosing, he’s inside potting balls and brushing the felt. He takes the snooker very, very seriously.

The kids were momentarily into it too. But then he got a bit DanceMoms about it. He started fretting about whether they’d chalked up the cue enough, critiquing their stance and position, exhaling impatiently when they’d bump a ball. And asking them if they were, ahem, “taking this seriously or not?”

Short answer – no, they weren’t taking it seriously at all. Why would they?

Kids want to smack a ball around a table for a laugh for a while, then get back out into that evil land-killing sunshine. Apart from the youngest, that is. She’s an enthusiast for the game and seems to handle the intense tuition well.

She doesn’t bite back when he starts to fret over her angles – she takes it all in her stride and seemingly appreciates the tutelage.

So I leave them to it ... it can go for hours.

So you see a pattern developing here? Hours of hosing and watering, followed by hours of snooker playing and tuition, equals hours of husband busily preoccupied, which equals hours of time for the rest of us to not be bothered with weather reports and how to play snooker. I call it a win-win.