Well watered

In summer 1980 P and I planned our first real holiday together, a hitching and camping trip (because we had almost no money) across the south of Ireland, which would culminate on the beautiful Dingle beaches we had seen in Ryan's Daughter. We soon learned why Ireland was so green. We spent our first night in a B&B in Waterford to escape from torrential rain and a Saturday night in a barn in the Blackwater Valley, where spiky straw and scuttling rats kept us awake for hours; the highlight of the trip was the friendly woman in a land rover who picked us up on the country road outside the barn before seven o'clock on Sunday morning and took us to her home for a wonderful cooked breakfast. When, several soggy fields later, we finally reached a hillside above Dingle, we woke to a stream running through our sodden tent and drenching our sleeping bags. We didn't make it to the beach. We blew the rest of our money on train tickets back to the ferry. It did occasionally stop raining on our journey, and the landscapes were beautiful even through the mist, but hitching proved very difficult and camping a disaster. We dried the tent in my parents' garden, and the relationship survived the soggy holiday - it was probably good training for the next forty years.

I found myself remembering that summer when I walked up the hill in fine drizzle at teatime yesterday. It was the brightest point in the day, though not actually sunny, and the range of greens on the hillsides were dazzling. A few weeks ago I was worrying about the drought conditions we had experienced for much of the spring and early summer; now, we've had weeks of cloud and rain, albeit only occasionally heavy, and the meadows, trees and weeds are blissfully well watered and growing apace. Our vegetables are well watered too, with much lower water consumption than in previous summers. The potatoes and onions seem happy, the brassicas are coming along nicely, the tomatoes are finally, slowly ripening, but the squashes, the aubergines and even the courgettes are longing for more warmth and a bit of sun and will probably not produce much of a crop. The forecast seems to be for plenty more of the same, for at least another week. It's getting a little dispiriting.