AS I write, it’s raining, which isn’t too unusual. In fact, yesterday we were driving back from a trip to Lancashire and as we crossed the Cornwall boundary near Launceston, it started raining, much to Geraldine’s disgust. I heard a mutter about “typical”.

We are not short of rain in Cornwall, I must admit, though, of course, we do get warm sunshine as well. Bodmin averages about 45 inches of rain a year, but up on the moor itself it’s more like 55 to 60 inches.

It’s interesting that an inch of rain falling over an acre of ground weighs about 113 tons. That’s over 6,000 tons of water per acre per year, which is going some. Of course, most of it runs off – the Camel discharges 200 million tons of water a year.

To make you feel better, Styhead in Cumbria is the official wettest place in Britain with about 180 inches per year, around four times that of Bodmin. But that pales rather in comparison with the wettest recorded place in the world – a village in north east India called Mawsynram where over 465 inches has been recorded in a year – about 10 times that of Bodmin.

Incredibly, it has recorded almost 40 inches in 24 hours, almost a year’s rainfall for Bodmin. I was thinking this might persuade Geraldine that the weather on Bodmin Moor isn’t particularly wet, but to no avail.

In reality, rain is what makes our planet habitable and it is estimated about 500 billion tons of water is sucked up into the atmosphere and then dropped on the planet’s surface – about 80 per cent over the oceans.

But, I have to say, whilst it can get a bit depressing, I’d rather have the rain than no rain – the Atacama desert in South America has had no recorded rainfall. No thanks.