Watering-can legalists ferry relays while the butt tours draw nodding men from other streets
Tuesday. The hosepipe ban has arrived, announced with the solemnity this nation reserves for water, and the street has responded with its full repertoire, compliance, performance of compliance, and the quiet nocturnal exceptions that everyone practises and no one confesses. By mid-morning the front gardens had sorted themselves into moral categories visible from the pavement, the brown-lawn martyrs, whose scorched grass is worn like a campaign medal, the watering-can legalists, technically compliant, ferrying cans from the kitchen in relays that consume entire evenings and, I would estimate, more water, and the suspiciously verdant, whose hydrangeas glow with a health that will be discussed, at length, at the bins meeting’s successor event, whenever convened.
I am a legalist, I confess it. Two cans, evening service, the roses only, and the roses know there is a war on and are being brave about it. But I wish to record the deeper truth of the hosepipe ban, which is that this country enjoys it. Not the drought, the ban. The ban gives August its plot. Strangers who would not exchange a syllable in June now conduct full seminars at the garden wall on greywater, on the reuse of bathwater, on the legality of the bucket, the bucket being to the hosepipe ban what the loophole is to the tax code, celebrated, envied, and slightly disreputable. Mr. Patterson has rigged a water butt arrangement of such complexity that men come from other streets to view it, and he conducts the tours with a modesty that fools nobody. The Environment Agency publishes the actual drought guidance, reservoir levels and river flows, sober reading, and I read it, and then I go out and watch Mr. Patterson demonstrate the butt to an audience of nodding men, and I know which document this street is really governed by.
The Lawn Question
On lawns, the national schism deepens. The martyrs hold that a brown lawn in August is honesty, the grass is not dead, merely dormant, and will return with the rains, all true, and they say it with the fervour of people who have found a theology that requires no watering. My neighbour Mrs. Achebe, whose lawn is the colour of digestive biscuit, put it best over the wall, the lawn is resting, she said, we should all be so sensible, and went back to her chair in the shade with her book, resting alongside it in solidarity, and I looked at my relay of cans and my brave roses and felt, briefly, like a woman bailing the Titanic with good intentions. But we persist. Gardening in this country was never agriculture. It is correspondence, an ongoing letter to the future written in perennials, and one does not stop writing merely because the post is delayed.
The allotments, I hear from Doris, have entered their siege economy, water butts under armed watch, figuratively, mostly, and the marrow men conducting dawn irrigation with the discretion of smugglers. There is a man on the far plots, name withheld even from this diary, who is rumoured to walk his watering cans at five in the morning under a coat. In August, on the allotments, water moves the way brandy moved in the 1780s, and the parish tolerates it the same way, everyone scandalised, no one reporting, half of them customers.
Evening at the Wall
This evening the street gathered, unplanned, as it does in a heatwave, at the cool end of the pavement by the postbox corner, chairs migrating out of front doors one by one until a parliament had formed, and the ban was debated, and the verdant were teased, and denied everything, glowing, and someone’s grandchildren ran the length of the terrace through a sprinkler, and diary, before you write to the authorities, it was a paddling pool being filled, entirely legal, the overspill merely generous, and every adult present had independently verified the legality before enjoying it, because we are who we are. The children ran through the overspill shrieking until dark. The martyrs watched from their brown lawns and smiled. Even theology makes exceptions for grandchildren. Especially theology.
Filed the day with the satirical desk at The London Prat, and posted the account to Bohiney Magazine in America, whose correspondent replies that in his state a man may water anything at any hour and the difficulty is rather the opposite, persuading the sky to stop, and who asks, sincerely, how a nation famous for rain runs short of water, and I have written back with the only answer we possess, which is that we did not plan for success, the rain was always assumed, like the monarchy and the biscuit supply, and when an assumption stumbles here we do not fix it, we form an orderly relationship with the shortage and grow to love the drama. The ban will lift with the first proper storm. The street will stand at its windows watching the rain with proprietary satisfaction, every one of us thinking, quite right, as if the weather had read our minutes. It usually has.
Tally, two cans to the roses, one butt tour attended, one paddling pool adjudicated legal, the digestive lawn resting comfortably. August has its plot. The hydrangeas are saying nothing. Neither, officially, am I.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk