Denley Moor

We need a bit of rain.  For the garden, you know.  Well, I'm looking out of the window and it's so wet that I wouldn't be at all surprised if Poseidon popped by to borrow a cup of salt.  Just look at my ConDem Coalition roses.  Condemned indeed.  Planted in the spirit of goodwill and amity, they had flourished, despite their exposure to disapproving gusts from the south.  Now, thanks to the rain, they look like the victims of common assault and public order offences.   

Having sploshed back from the paper shop, wondering whether my Bronze Life Saving medal might belatedly be of value, I can see that United Utilities has responded to the soaking not with life rafts, but a hosepipe ban in the North West of England.  A part of Europe so rainy, I'm surprised anyone even has a hosepipe.  And - in case an overdose of A-level Wordsworth had you switching off at the sound of the word "Cockermouth" -  the location of some pretty awful floods last November.

Bizarrely, you are still permitted to fill your swimming pools and hot tubs.  Perhaps this exemption is some sort of World Cup consolation prize for all those Cheshire footballers and their WAGs.  You may also continue to hose down your dogs and cats, which, as far as I'm concerned, is clear proof that no-one at United Utilities has ever owned a cat. 

For we are, despite today's celestial bath-emptying, in the throes of a drought.  Journalists feel obliged to refer back to 1976, when the whole country was simmering away like a Vesta curry, too hot to worry about Uncle Jim and the forthcoming Great Debate on education.  Perhaps Michael Gove is hoping for the same weather to prevail in the early stages of this government.  (Ironically, a different sort of stubborn high pressure is affecting Powys County Council as its secondary school modernisation programme is slowly bringing communities to boiling point.)

In the Cynon Valley, that baking summer meant that mains water was shut off.  Kids, mams and dads on stop fortnight visited the standpipe daily, at pre-set times, with as many buckets as it took to fill the bath with cold water.  Now the South Wales valleys can give Cumbria a run for its money when it comes to abundant precipitation.  So you can imagine the topic of conversation when it was discovered that we were on rations but the rain-lite middle classes of Cardiff were wantonly enjoying the pleasures of running hot and cold. 

Liverpool was enjoying a decent water supply a hundred years ago, thanks to Lake Vyrnwy in Montgomeryshire. Severn Trent, which owns the reservoir and dam, is offering the surrounding 23,000 acres on long lease - the biggest land sale in Britain this year.  The reason given is that agricultural estate management is not its core business, which is true, but after 100 years, it will inevitably have built up a specialist knowledge of the estate which will be hard to match.  Over the years, I've acted on the sales and purchases of various properties on the estate, and have found Severn Trent pretty reasonable to deal with, which isn't always the case with trustees of large estates.

Perhaps the reason is more prosaic; even in this property-driven recession, agricultural land has maintained its value. Two years ago, Ofwat imposed its biggest fine ever on Severn Trent  - £35.8m - for fraudulently supplying incorrect data to the regulator. Ofwat's draft determination of Severn Trent business plan for the next five years required a net capital investment programme of £2.2bn plus an over-all reduction in bills of 8%.  A costly time for a private company in a Britain grappling with its deficit.

Regulatory consultations on the sale will begin soon.  Wales has notoriously sacrificed communities to safeguard English water supplies in the past.  Here's hoping a possible financial drought doesn't see history repeating itself.