Will the summer deluge continue?
For full details of the washout at home, and heatwave on the Continent,
THERE is a Dylan Thomas poem which tends to come to my mind at this time of year, entitled That Sanity
Be Kept. The author sits at an open window in a clean shirt watching the peaceful comings and goings of a sunny day.
“The sweet suburban music from a hundred lawns / Comes softly to my ears,” he writes. “The English mowers mow and mow.”
I thought of that this week as I lay on a patch of brown scrubland somewhere in North London which wouldn’t have looked out of place on the South African Veldt.
Could our sweet green lawns be starting to wilt in the face of a changing climate? Certainly down south, at least, it is scratchier than I remember for a good few years.
Perhaps we are heading the way of California, which is experiencing four years of record-breaking drought. In parts of the state there is now no greater shame than to be seen with a lush green turf surrounding one’s home. In Vancouver, too, a city that has experienced just 10mm of rain since May 1, hundreds of residents have been phoning up the authorities to rat out neighbours who have been watering gardens in secret.
In Britain, while the temperature has been fairly normal this July, in eastern England only half of the amount of rainfall expected by midmonth has fallen. Surrey and Sussex have both recorded less than 20 per cent of the month’s average rainfall with 7.8mm and 9mm respectively.
However, I am also reliably informed that dog and fox piddle also plays its nefarious part in turning our lawns brown.
Maybe, then, the finger of blame should rest not on the skies above, but the menagerie of four-legged creatures that scuttle around my local parks with near impunity. And the English mowers should aim for a new target.