I feel like it’s never not been raining. Probably because it’s raining, and has been pretty much non-stop since, well, since forever. The cold hard truth of it, is that yes there have been occasional days where the sun has shone, but they’ve been rarer than hen’s teeth and easy to miss.

At the briefest of glimpses at the sun, spirits soar and hopes lift that we’re about to put the infernal rain behind us. Yesterday I went completely mad and put the roof down on my ancient Mazda on the way home from David Lloyd. Only on the way home mind, I couldn’t risk leaving it open while I was at Cardio Tennis only to walk out an hour later into a surprise deluge. As it was I only just made it home before the heavens opened.

It’s a shame, because when the weather’s consistently this awful it’s easy to miss all the beauty of Spring. The snowdrops at Welford got eaten by a horde of hungry slugs (which may or may not be weather-related but it’s still sad. And gross), daffs passed me by. Celandines and marsh marigolds are coming up where they can along , a beautiful bright yellow against muddy paths and overflowing rivers. Travelling up to London, the landscape between Newbury and Theale is underwater, colonised by happy geese, egrets and swans.

The only real silver lining under these clouds, metaphorical and real, is that Dolly (the German Shepherd), and I enjoy walks pretty much to ourselves, as the coat-wearing tribe of assorted less hardy hounds, tend to avoid dirt like the plague.