The patter of rain on the windows at night is not an unwelcome sound. It waters the garden and replenishes the water butts (which mainly get used on irrigating the rain-protected zone of the polytunnel. If we get a decent drop over the next few days, I might even get to see if the new tap I fitted recently works.

I had given up on trying to find the kind of fitting I wanted in garden centres, where the small bits of plastic weren’t labelled as being designed for stopping the inflow pipe and were too expensive to consider hacking towards that purpose. In theory my water butt set up should stop filling when the water reaches the input level but, in practise, the joints are not as water tight as I would like them to be (another strike against the fixtures on sale) and I have been in the habit of jamming a cork in when they are full.

That is awkward though and so, a couple of months ago, I spotted and bought a tap that I found in the home brew section of my local hardware shop. It took me a while to get round to fitting it but it is now in place and it looks like I will get a chance to evaluate its performance in the next few days.