I spent the first 50 years of my life in Sydney, I was a fully fledged city boy. And I hated days like today.

What’s wrong with today? It is raining. It is pouring. Throughout the country old men in their droves are snoring. Young men are snoring too but that is because they spent last night at the pub and now are too crook to go to work, but that has nothing to do with the weather.

When I lived in the city I hated the rain. If I had to drive to work the trafic congestion increased ten-fold. Driving around Sydney in sunshine is never much fun, but in the rain it is the stuff of nightmares.

Of course, I could catch the train. But the trains had a habit of being cancelled, late or crowded, usually all three. So 13,000 people would pack into a carriage designed to accommodate 27. The train would move about 30 metres from the station and then stop, due to maintenance problems, driver problems, or merely out of habit.

At 11:15 you would finally arrive at work. You had missed your 9:30 meeting, but then so had everyone else. You spent the day in wet clothes and soggy shoes. No one was in a good frame of mind.

I hated the rain.

Of course, these days we have been conditioned to love the rain because NSW is in a constant state of drought. But whenever it rained it seemed that everywhere got a soaking except the places that needed it. The farmers out west never got it, and neither did the catchment area for Sydney’s dam. How Sydney could be in the grip of a monsoonal downpour but it’s catchment area, the size of Tasmania, miss out, is beyond me. Who designed this system anyway? Probably a project manager.

But now I live on a farm. If we have no rain we have no water. That means that I can’t drink coffee, so I die.

Yesterday and last night we got 30mm, and in the past 10 days we have had over 100mm.

I may treat myself to a shower and a second cup of coffee.