At six o’clock on Sunday morning I was standing on what used to be my lawn, decanting a washing-up bowl of grey water onto a hydrangea like a man disposing of evidence. The hosepipe has just been banned. The water butt gave up in May. The lawn itself is now the colour and texture of a digestive biscuit.
Everyone of a certain age says the same thing: this is 1976 again. Standpipes in the street, ladybirds in biblical quantities, and a government so rattled it appointed an actual Minister for Drought, whereupon it promptly rained for a month. We got through it because it was a freak. It has stopped being a freak.
The Met Office spent June marking fifty years since the legendary summer of 1976, still the hottest and sunniest on record, its peak temperature now beaten on six days in the past decade. Meanwhile the Environment Agency’s latest bulletin reads like the opening chapter of a disaster novel: five water companies imposing hosepipe bans, reservoirs below average, and 729 separate restrictions on farmers’ abstraction licences while winter storage reservoirs drain and East Anglian livestock men run out of forage in July.
My lawn will recover. The people who grow your dinner may not.
Consider Jeremy Clarkson, Britain’s most heavily televised farmer. He says last year’s scorched summer gave him the second worst harvest in living memory, with yields down as much as 40 per cent, and he has admitted that Diddly Squat will not make money on wheat and barley. Read that again. A man with an Amazon contract, a farm shop, a pub and several million viewers cannot make the actual farming bit of his farm pay. Now picture the farm three miles down the road with the same weather, the same costs and no camera crew.
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