NOW, I know most people, including Geraldine, have really enjoyed the recent prolonged, warm, sunny, spring weather, but I’m much happier with a variation involving regular rain.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a few warm days. But then we need two or three rainy days to balance them out.

The trouble with long, dry spells of weather is that birds and animals find it hard to locate water, and also mud for nests, in the case of the birds, and the fire risk increases, as we saw recently on Bodmin Moor.

When I first went to South Africa, in the days before the internet and electricity, I had no idea what I was going to. I was completely unprepared.

Much of South Africa is well above sea level and called the Highveldt (as opposed to the Lowveldt, which is… er… lower). The city of Johannesburg sits almost 6,000 feet above sea level.

Anyway, I arrived in early June and the summer thunderstorms that bring nearly all the rain had stopped earlier in the year.

After April, each day is warm and sunny with cool nights. The result is an increasingly dusty, dry and brown landscape.

I well remember sitting in the plane as I saw South Africa for the first time, looking out of the window onto the brownest landscape I’d ever seen. This was nothing like England.

Little did I know, it would be four months before I saw any rain, not that I would have believed it anyway.

By the end of that period, the ground is as hard as a rock and everything is dusty. Even after 16 years, I still didn’t like it.

Later, living near Cambridge was pleasant but it also has dry summers - so, give me a soft, Cornish shower nearly every day! Not that Geraldine agrees!