I’m doing two things at once right now. Probably more than two. I’m sitting at my new desk. It is a thing of beauty. It has a red leather inlaid top with gold leaf – well leaf motifs in a gold colour strung around the edge of the leather, and other figured patterns. The leather is set into a walnut top with a fine patina (the advert said that). It has two columns of four drawers on either side, and a drawer in the middle. It is a very happy thing. The gold pattern contains a shamrock, a rose, and a thistle – and something else that is not a leek. I want it to represent the British Isles, but maybe it is more stylised than that. The reason I’m going into this on my gardening blog is that I’m interested in the way plants are ubiquitous in so much design. I should probably say more about that, but now I’m going to talk about my water tank.

I’ve been really side-tracked. I put on some music to carry me along this morning and it has wormed its way into my soul, or something. It’s a Spotify playlist and the piece that captivated me was Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell. I’m not in any way qualified to talk about music, but this music has woken something up in me, which is not entirely helpful. I want to tell you about my water tank.

It’s big and black and collects all the rain from the northern roofs of the house. I went out the other day – in the rain – and took the lid off and watched the water pouring in. It was so exciting. In no time it was two thirds full. It rained again last night, and in a minute I will have a look to see how much it has filled. When full it holds 1100 litres, which is a lot, although still small compared with the annual rainfall here of 27,000 litres – that is from the area of roof in question. I’m looking at that number and wondering if it can be true, particularly as I remember the dry summer. I will check the figures. First, though, I will go to my yoga class.

I’m back from yoga, very relaxed, and I’ve enlisted help from copilot to do the sums. I was more or less right. I’ll show you our workings: roof area 40.76 sq metres, annual rainfall 763mm, 40.76 x 763 = 31,086 litres. This is because 1 mm of rain on 1 sq metre equals 1 litre. Who would have thought it?

If that’s not exciting enough, I’ve connected a hose to the tank that leads down to the pond, so I can top up the pond whenever I like, and I’ve also cleaned out another open topped water tank by the greenhouse and put a lid on it so it will stay cleanish, and filled that from the big tank as well.

It’s late now, the end of the day. The two things I was doing at the beginning of the day were writing this and getting a refund from Now Tv. Both things are accomplished, along with quite a number of other things, including buying conduit and hiding the wires that come from the tv. That took the best part of the day, but the little plastic thing is quite pleasing.

So another day, not much gardening, but that’s ok. Time to post this, dance a little, then sleep.