My son asked me the other day why someone was using a sprinkler to water their lawn.
We were travelling through Blaauwberg and we had just been talking about the severe water shortage and what we all needed to do to save water.
The house in question had a beautifully green manicured lawn and it was being watered in the middle of a fairly hot day.
I couldn’t give him a reasonable explanation. But it did get me talking about how wasteful we used to be with water when I was a child.
I remember brushing my teeth with the tap running.
Do you remember how on hot summer days, one of the more playful adults would hose the neighbourhood kids down from their front yard?
It was such a lot of fun. We would bolt past as fast as we could, and the man would pretend to be irritated by us and try to spray us.
Of course the idea was to get as wet as possible. So we made sure he never missed.
Hosing the garden in the middle of the day was also something that was very common when I was growing up.
I clearly remember washing a cousin’s car with a hosepipe on a hot summer’s day.
I’m afraid those will have to be memories; stories we tell our disbelieving grandkids one day.
These days there’s just no excuse for having a green lawn any longer. Unless, of course, you are taking the trouble to recycle your grey water.
But the fact is, your garden isn’t nearly as important as you think. And neither is having a clean car. Or spotless kitchen windows.
We don’t have a choice, we are simply going to have to learn to live with limited water availability.
And, most importantly, it’s something we are going to have to teach our kids.
We have to do this together and we must teach each other, because there are still people out there who either don’t know or simply don’t care.
But if we run out of water, we are all going to feel it, so we need to reduce our consumption drastically and urgently.
As to the watery playtimes, we have endless beaches all around us, and 14 different tidal pools to choose from.
And who needs a blooming garden when Kirstenbosch is the envy of the botany world?
So really, what exactly are we giving up?