WE, or more accurately Geraldine, have re-arranged things at home. The sun room, or conservatory, now has two couches in it and we seem to have moved just about every other bit of furniture to accommodate it.

I took advantage of this one recent Sunday, laying on the couch and staring up at the rain falling on the glass ceiling. I was, in the words of Mickey Flanagan, doing “proper nothing”, something of an art.

I was wondering if I’d seen the raindrops before, given that in Cornwall we get rather a lot of the stuff. And, as we’re taught at school, there is a cycle of water on Earth.

The sun heats up water and creates water vapour. This becomes clouds which eventually lose water as rain or snow, which falls on the Earth and either runs into the sea, or, in fact for 85 per cent of all rain, falls on the ocean.

Therefore, it’s not too hard to think we’ve seen the water before that rapidly migrates through our fairly short rivers and into the sea, although the average time spent in the atmosphere is calculated to be about nine days.

However, some water doesn’t recycle quickly. Some finds its way into deep geological reservoirs and can stay there for up to 10,000 years. Even more amazing, water that ends up in a glacier, such as in Antarctica or Greenland, can be there for close to a million years (although the average time is much less).

Included in this is the fact that the rainfall patterns globally vary significantly. We might think Cornwall is wet but it actually averages about 1000mm a year. The documented wettest place is in north east India, called Mawsynram — it gets 12,000mm a year.

In contrast, the driest place, in the Atacama Desert, has no recorded rainfall ever. So, being in good old middle of the road Cornwall isn’t that bad!

• Fred Knobbit is a nature blogger. He grew up in the Pennines in Lancashire on the edge of an industrial town but is now safely in Cornwall. You can read his archive at www.bodminblogger.com