Back in the seventies if asked where we were from us Devonians would often reply ‘sunny Devon’, usually tongue-in-cheek and sometimes in jest. Yes, it was quite sunny for quite a lot of the time, especially during July and August. But there were also quite a few rainy days; three or four days of sun then one or two days of rain. Holiday towns became adept at offering things to do on those rainy days. Now… July is almost over and it looks as if this will be the first rain-free month I have ever known. That is quite a landmark and it is frightening.

Back then ‘sunny Devon’ was a selling point – the phrase often appeared on Greetings Cards. After London it was the most popular holiday destination in England, for the moors, the coastline and the beaches – and the mild weather. But this summer, ‘sunny Devon’ has well and truly ceased to be an advertising slogan; just about every county in Britain is sunny so it becomes meaningless.

This year the ground is parched, my pond is almost empty – I am not sure if my fish will survive – and there is almost no colour in my garden. Almost all of my plants are burned and have stopped flowering. I am not sure which plants will one day spring back into life, other than the old rose and the hydrangea. That old rose would normally have a ludicrous number of blooms right now; a glorious Devon cream with hints of peach and yellow. Not a single bloom; not even a single bud to provide hope. The hydrangea has flowers still, but they are not natural; they look as if they have been under the grill for too long with all the life and colour sucked out of them. Even the crocosmias  failed to flower.

So, this has most certainly been a ‘sunny Devon’ year, but minus those odd rainy days when the tourists would complain until they found the casinos and games machines. This is the future of summer for all of us: depleted harvests, dry gardens, water shortages, hosepipe bans. Yes, we have all experienced these things in our lifetimes, but not on the scale or ferocity or certainty that we will see in the decades ahead.

Many of us knew 30 years ago that this was coming – the likely impact of climate change – and that this would only be a foretaste of what is to come. We also knew what to do about it, but only a handful of us made the personal changes and sacrifices that everyone needed to make in order to mitigate the worst of what was to come. The rest seem to be still waiting for someone else to do something, failing to take personal responsibility or even, perversely, ignoring science altogether. Whatever happened to our survival instinct?