Wellington has been experiencing a drought. It has been a dry summer and with no rain in the last 6 weeks all outdoor garden watering was banned a few days ago.

By  Sunday we were down to 20 days of water left in the reservoirs around the city.

Presumably once that’s gone we will be forced to drink wine and bathe in champagne. And friends, any spare bottles of Perrier you have sitting in the cupboards, please send it this way urgently.

If you sense a little cynicism in this post it is only because I am a Wellingtonian and I just knew that the good weather couldn’t hold out forever. Yesterday and today the rains arrived.

Good news for the garden but bad news for the Wellington water supply – apparently. Because the catchment area streams and rivers have been so low and full of dust and dirt, the recent rain washed all this muck with it and became too dirty to be purified by the Wellington water system.

So the irony is that after 2 days of solid rain we have 2 less days of water available. Now, where’s that champagne?