Eleven days of rain in succession. It is not the soothing kind of rain that makes you feel cosy and glad you are indoors. It sounds like war repurposed as moisture. It gives me no comfort at night. As I hear it toppling from the broken drain above my window and gathering in puddles on the back yard, there is a growing picture in my mind that every droplet of water from the moor is hurtling down the hill and congregating here at the low four-way intersection of tiny lanes where the house stands: four virtual waterslides, coming together as one. I took my eye off the garden for a week and now I fear it’s escaped from me forever: a raging, dripping jungle. The damp patches on the bedroom walls are getting bigger. I had one of my funny spells coming up the stairs yesterday and reached for the wall for balance and the surface was so wet, my hand skidded across it, and I tumbled into a bookcase, bruising my hip. I messaged my landlady about the damp and she just said, ‘I’ll send my guy over.’ That was four days ago and since then I have heard nothing. Her ‘guy’ is Nick, a cheerful, charming odd-jobber who loves a chat but never returns phone calls. The last time he came over to look at the damp, after a similarly wet period at the end of May, he recommended a mildew-removing spray and advised that I put the heating on more often. We were standing in the garden at the time, and I resisted the urge to show him the thermometer hanging in the greenhouse a few paces away, which showed the temperature as 27 degrees.