Way back - May or thereabouts - my next-door neighbour offered me some tiny, spare (she'd bought too many) sweet pea plants. My heart sank. I am no good at looking after plants and I didn't have time to re-pot them. I ignored most and stuck a few in the old chimney pots outside my front door. They thrived on whatever the weather threw at them while my neighbour's all, inexplicably, died. I encouraged her five-year-old to pick as many flowers from mine as she wanted in pursuit of this summer's passion - making 'perfume' - and occasionally as I went past I picked off the dead flowers or seed pods. They came to the end of their life, as they should, around the end of August. Then our second summer of absurd September heat and torrential rain revived them.

And some people think climate change is a myth.