A SPOT OF RAIN? - WELL IT'S BETTER THAN BEING BURNT AT THE STAKE

At last it's rained! It was beginning to feel as though global warming had got its feet well and truly under this end of the planetary table; that the Sahara was moving north as fast as it is moving south. Here in this part of South Wales we can't have seen rain for a month. That's why I am writing about it. I don't know when we'll see the next lot. Even so the garden looks merely dampened, not soaked; should the sun come out we'll soon be back to the half-inch gape between the sides of our great terracotta pots and the soil within.

For we haven't much gardening space. Our garden is what might best be described as 'patio' - or even, in that lovely, picturesque phrase so beloved of estate agents - 'compact and bijou,' though in this case the bijou description might be pushing things a bit, bijou after all meaning 'jewel.' Still, one can but aspire, can one not? And it is only April; the sweet peas are still, metaphorically, in short trousers.

But, unfortunately, the rain has entailed a certain depression of spirits. Instead of seeing from my window vapour trails across a bright blue sky in which a couple of buzzards wheel lazily on the thermals that rise on the valley side, I look out only on a cold greyness, reminiscent of the sea in winter. For the rain naturally brings dampness as well. So I sit here huddled over the laptop wearing a winter polo neck with the desk lights blazing as though it were 4.30 on a winter's afternoon.

Then one might reasonable look forward in expectation to tea and crumpets. But on this spring morning there can be no such anticipation. Instead I have had to resort - indeed have already resorted - to a chemical pick-me up in the shape of a tablet of St John's Wort.

I must say I find these work quite miraculously, transforming a leaden sullen perspective on the day into one of bright and carefree sunshine. Nature's Prosac they are sometimes called. Never having had to resort to proper Prosac, I can't say whether that is an apt description or not. I can only say they work for me - though they don't seem to have any effect on other people - and a few are not supposed to take them at all on account of their doing something or other to the heart, or is it the circulation?

This set me thinking for I often wonder whom it was - 'whom' being obviously a whole army of people down the generations - that discovered the physical properties of plants?

How would you discover, I wonder, that St John's Wort - not a very likely plant one would have thought - had the ability to cheer people up? The sheer impossibility of making such a finding - short of black magic - is demonstrated by our reaction to the humble lettuce, which is supposed to be mildly soporific. The saintly Beatrix Potter no less tells us so in 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit.'

Other, more scientific sources, inform us that lettuce is a source of opiates, though, of course, in minute quantities. Though if you are a rabbit…….? Maybe that is the origin of the phrase happy bunny. Not that rabbits get to eat much lettuce in these parts, at least not the wild ones. And if you are a poor caged rabbit, well, I would think you must need all the stimulation you can get.

But I digress. Though I like lettuce and salads generally I would never have connected lettuce with drowsiness in a thousand years. And if I were looking for a pick-me up I am sure I would have regained and lost, lost and regained my natural spirits ten times over before ever alighting on St John's Wort.

Moreover, this would be before you started with finding the right quantities. Even if were you told which plants did what, you would be unable to treat people without either having no effect whatsoever or, at the other extreme, poisoning them. No wonder then that countrywomen in past times were persecuted for witchcraft.

Which, with my Scottish roots makes me shudder. For nowhere were alleged witches (and it didn't take much alleging) persecuted more insanely than in bonnie (ha!) Scotland. Given my tendency of recommending herbal potions and my habit of addressing myself to animals, whether in my speak or theirs, I fear that I wouldn't have lasted very long at all in those dark sixteenth century days.

Fennie would have been lashed to the stake and fried to a cinder without the option. All of which does make me feel happy to be living in the present and really quite glad that all I have to worry about is a little grey sky.