Dear Hosepipe

Dear Hosepipe,

Please forgive me for completely forgetting about you since last year.

Throughout those long winter months, there you hung limp and forlorn on the back fence, exposed to the vagaries of wind and weather, heartlessly unloved, when you should have been safely hibernating somewhere inside.
Even at the start of the growing season, I dispensed with the need for your undying services and used that pampered plastic watering can that’s kept in the shed, on my newly sown seeds.

For weeks and weeks I cast all cares to the wind and gambled on the weather to keep things watered. Sure enough, those ever grey leaden skies delivered the goods as regular as clockwork.

Then, as we got further into the growing season, the heavens began to fail, and despite my naked midnight rain-dances around the water butt, the allotment became as dry as a dead dingo’s donger, as they say in some parts of the world.

Imagine my horror that day, to find all the vegetables gasping like lost souls in the Sahara Desert. I’ll never forget those terrible scenes of baby carrots and beetroot begging for water.

Hurriedly I plugged you in and rolled you out, then expected you to perform immediately without question, before I got reported to the RSPCV.

So I can’t really blame you for springing that leak, but did it have to be at the delivery end just as I turned the nozzle on, and leave me pi**ing wet through for the rest of the day.

P.S.
I was surprised how much of the stuff you could actually dispense in those few seconds that I spluttered for breath, with the freezing deluge that hit me in the face. You certainly made your point, I’ll put you away next winter.

Tom Wetall.