When our cheery postman caught me slipping out to the car and asked the simple question, ‘How are you, Giles?’, I struggled to think of a simple answer.
Feverish was the word that sprang to mind when I tried to analyse my early morning state of being. My nocturnal activities are starting negatively to affect my outlook on life.
At least I am not a so-called parasomniac – one of those unfortunates who order random goods from eBay while asleep. But I admit to having inherited from my father a tendency to watch television into the small hours, as well as an addictive personality.
YouTube is my latest nocturnal addiction. As the head of the household, I operate on a need-to-know basis. With a decision needing to be made about a summer vacation, I am in a state of hypervigilance regarding which apocalyptic European heat-dome destination to avoid.
There is no precedent for the information overload this cottager is experiencing. Two hundred years ago, the agricultural workers here would seize, if they could read, on any printed matter they came across – in the form of scraps of newspaper used to wrap cheese or lardy cakes.
The whole village would reflect upon, discuss and share what small, often out-of-date nuggets they had gleaned from the outside world. Today, we suffer from a constantly pulsating tide of non-stop breaking news.
As I scroll through possible holiday destinations on YouTube, I fear Putin is right about our degraded culture in the UK. What was once described as the study of atmospheric phenomena, which would fill many an agreeable hour of harmless record-keeping for retired generals checking rain gauges, is now lumped under the heading ‘Weather porn’.
The algorithms fed me golf-ball-sized hailstorms denting cars in Micheldorf, Austria, and sending a brass band pell-mell into a giant puddle. I watched flimsy panels of newly-built gymnasium walls being ripped off by violent gusts like a pack of cards, and Greek islands on fire.
But it was a polar vortex heading towards Chile that lodged in my cerebellum. It was regurgitated in the psychic dustbin of my waking dreams in a vision of my very promising burgeoning winter squashes being ‘frosted’ in July.
I got straight onto our landline to a friend in Balham to see whether his bonsai trees had been affected.
‘For God’s sake!’ he yelled. ‘Stop watching YouTube and start drinking decaffeinated coffee. You won’t regret it.’
At a family wedding the other day, kindly nephews and nieces patiently pointed out the error of my ways. They explained that their generation and, indeed most internet-users, have developed a ‘filter’ regarding the internet.
As a late comer to YouTube, I do not yet detect any budding filtration mechanism. I just take what the algorithm spews up.
My passive acceptance of the diet served dates back to my time as a sickly asthmatic child in bed, leafing through my hardback 12-volume children’s encyclopaedia. I can blame my grasshopper mind on these formative years of darkened rooms, honey-and- lemon beverages and enforced detention, long before the technical fix of Ventolin saved the day.
But why am I looking abroad for climate chaos when we now have it in our own country? The Arab nations so love our English rain that they often congregate in London parks in great numbers soaking under the dripping green boughs. Not this year, though – the greensward in Kensington already resembles khaki, drought-stricken landing strips in safari country.
I turn to Geoffrey Grigson’s The English Year, a daily weather record, to compare today’s weather with that of yesteryear as viewed through the eyes of the most discerning writers – Hardy, Ruskin and Dorothy Wordsworth, to name but a few.
It doesn’t take me long to spot an unintentionally comic posting by Gilbert White in 1785 that conjured visions of Eric Idle sniggering, ‘Say no more!’ ‘Swifts copulate in the air, as they flie.’
But, it has to be said, the weather of yesteryear was more predictable than it is today.
As an act of kindness, my wife brings me coffee in bed each morning, along with the tabloid. It’s the usual doublespeak. On one page, ‘A heatwave hat trick looms’. On the next, ‘Parts of the UK to be battered by heavy rain, lightning and hail’.
In my feverish morning state, I confuse a number of auditory phenomena with distant rolls of thunder. The booms of big guns on Salisbury Plain are the usual suspects. So is the noise of next-door neighbours noisily wheeling their wheelie bins across cement paths.
Here in Wiltshire, we seem to have missed what there was of the summer rain. So when I hear the postman outside warning my affable neighbour, ‘They say there’s rain on the way,’ I realise I am the only villager who welcomes the news.
I have frittered away so many flowerpot man-hours with a watering can that my very waking dreams now consist of heavy rain and hail. I think, bring it on.
