Close your eyes and think of one well-known April phrase. It’s a wild stab in the dark but could ‘SHOWERS’ possibly be the answer?

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here (mainly because we are supposed to be saving it for our vegetables) but didn’t the powers that be at the water board shout ‘wolf’ a bit too soon?

Isn’t announcing a drought in March a bit like putting your ear plugs in before a Linkin Park concert? Or having a vasectomy the night before your honeymoon? It’s April for goodness sake, it’s supposed to rain.

Or is this all a cunning plan to make the water bosses look good? Because whatever happens they come out on top, like Kurt Russell at the beginning of Backdraft, emerging victorious, baby under each arm, to rescue us all, when all they did was panic too soon.

Which seems to be a running theme at the moment. Take the no-strike petrol panic. How absurd was that? Punch-ups at filling stations for no reason. What’s next? The bottled water fiasco. The ketchup crisis? The beer ban where the entire country disappears to the pub for a week to drink themselves silly in case supplies run low ( there’s an idea...) Apparently though, the rain won’t have any effect on the hosepipe ban. But as I look at our flooded river and the submerged fields, how can it not change anything? Our garden is almost tropical – we could grow pineapples. There are so may rainbows Judy Garland would be exhausted getting over them all.

At least the novelty of waking up to rainfall is so unique I could lie in bed all day and listen to it (there’s another idea). And even though there’s twice as much traffic because all the fair-weather cyclists and walkers get back in their cars, it’s still nice.

You can hear the ground gulping in relief, let alone the water board officials. Are they congratulating each other on a brilliant PR campaign while the rain falls? Cynical? Moi?