All we need is Harrison Ford and we’d know for sure we were trapped on the set of Blade Runner. Life in the West of Scotland this summer has fulfilled the film’s apocalyptic vision of climate change: incessant rain teeming from permanently darkened daytime skies.
Where I live, near Loch Lomond, there has been only one occasion since the beginning of July when there were three full consecutive dry days. In Skye, rain has fallen for 50 days, the longest uninterrupted spell of wet weather since 1861. In Dumfries and Galloway, they have had the wettest August since records began in 1914.
We have cultivated a mordant pessimism. “Not raining, shock,” we say, gloomily, peering out of bedroom windows in the morning. But we know that by lunchtime it will have started again.
Everywhere you go, you smell the rot. Timbers are swollen; doors stick; the ground, so saturated it can take no more, heaves beneath your feet. Strange, biblical things are happening in the natural world: toads queue at night outside the kitchen dooor, looking, I suspect, for somewhere dry to go. Small creatures - those that could not fly away; the eaves are empty, the normally prolific swallows having all disappeared - are drowning and dying. Fruit is dropping, half formed and rotting, onto lawns too wet to walk across, let alone cut.
Out of pity, one avoids discussing the situation with anyone who has to make a living outside. With dairy cows already housed inside, two months earlier than usual, and thousands of pounds worth of hay, haylage, and arable crops lying rotting in sodden fields - unreachable, even if it wasn’t raining, by mechanical means - many are facing financial meltdown. Landscape gardeners have stopped answering their phones.
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We get off flights from London and the south east feeling as if we have travelled a thousand miles from a different continent: one where it does not rain. Meanwhile, as if in some fantasy world, on TV we see the fight bushfires in California, and learn that Australia has experienced its warmest ever August, a record-breaking winter heat-wave.
The sorrow of this summer was encapsulated by one English family on a camping holiday, who ended up in sipping Cokes in damp, bedraggled silence in our local village pub. It had rained every day they were here. “We can’t wait to get back to Coventry,” said the father.