The other day a little bird told me she was a pluviophile. Pluvio, I thought. I knew I had come across it recently, written it even. They didn’t teach young moles Latin at my earthy Swiss school so I took the next best route and consulted Great Uncle Mole’s Oxford English Dictionary. Pluvial: belonging to rain. And yes, the niggle of familiarity was the French revolutionary calendar; the Pluviôse its fifth month, the rainy season spanning January and February.

There were several pluvios of one kind or another. It was a word that found its natural home in the 19th century. Cornelius Nicholson, a man with splendid eyebrows and great tufts of white hair either side of his bald dome, doctor of letters, fellow of the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquarians, director the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, sometime mayor of Kendal, wrote of the butter-women in his district being ‘exposed to the pluvial elements’ in 1832. The irascible and controversial Orientalist and translator of Arabian Nights, Richard Burton, was never one to hide his erudition, even when describing the simplest journey. ‘Irritated by the pertinacious perniciousness of Pluvian Jove’, he wrote of one wet day when he was traveling along the west coast of India sometime around 1850. I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It may have been the monsoon. Across the Atlantic some forty years on the poet James Russell Lowe wrote of the ‘artificial pluviosity of the gardener’s watering pot’. But after that the etymology of the word more or less falls out of usage.

At least … Something about Great Uncle Mole’s barometer is tickling my mind. Yes, there were other weather-measuring instruments that had belonged to his Mama and Papa (known as Gamm and Gump among my generation). When Great Uncle Mole had barely been breeched they had all spent a stint as weather-watchers in the Bernese Alps. One of the instruments had been a pluviometer, a sort of funnel and cylinder. Gump was quite obsessive about reading and recording the rainfall, even when he was in his dotage. Maybe pluviophilia is in my genes.

There was no mention of a pluviophile in the old OED. Perhaps it has been driven to germinate by this everlasting dry season. What used to be the lawn, the lovely lush green-ness you see me wading through above, is now just cracked earth. It was only days after that photoshoot in early February that it was mown down. Once the mature blades of grass had gone, all that was left was dead undergrowth.

Pluviophile. Saying it aloud makes me sigh with the deep contentment of a mole who is at one with its true nature. I say it slowly. It has a spacious, melodic, watery sound to it. Even if the word does not have the authority of the dictionary, it has come into usage, and so this true nature of mine is recognised by others, experienced by others, even. I am not the the only pluviophile in the world. There is the little bird who declared herself to me for one.

As I’ve been writing I have heard a strange sound, a sort of light tapping on the tin roof of my shed. I sit on the stoop so that I can smell it, too. Drops of rain. Not many, but its a start. And the birds are chirping, too.

Sundays always drew to a close in the same way at Great Uncle Mole’s burrow. At least in the winter they did. Or perhaps I only remember them as so. After a late lunch and an interlude timed by a pipe and a crossword, we’d set off for a bracing walk, buffeted by Siberian winds, our snouts stinging with sleet or hail, and our poor paws numb and blue. Two hours later, sometimes three we were back in front of the fire, toasting crumpets and drinking hot cocoa. Afterwards, Uncle Ratty read to us from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Saki. Great Uncle Mole left us to it and went off to run his bath. We would not see him again until Monday morning.

But we heard him. First the gushing taps, then the music. His gramophone sat on a shelf just outside the bathroom door. As soon as the taps were turned off, we heard the scratch as the needle touched the record, and then – you never knew quite what: Bartok, Fats Waller, Scott Jopli. You could trace Great Uncle Mole’s wet pawprints on the wooden boards in the passage between the bathroom door and the gramophone.

Uncle Mole’s Sunday night bath was a sacred ritual. The preparations began earlier when one of us, scuttle in paw, was given the task of going deep into the labyrinthine tunnels of the nether burrow to the coal cellar. But after that, responsibility was handed over to Uncle Ratty who was the only one allowed near the boiler, a great cast iron thing that spat sparks when you opened its door.

As a small mole I was envious. Not that we didn’t have baths too, but they were a quick in and out so that the water would still be hot for the next in line. Great Uncle Mole had his all to himself.

Now that I am an older mole I have incorporated the ritual as my own. I anticipate it all Sunday, and in the evening I put some music on, sometimes Great Uncle Mole’s favourites. I find myself a book, turn the taps on full pelt and pour in generous doses of Epsom salts. Always. Or at least when the weather has become cooler as it is now. This is what I did last Sunday night.

But the bathwater was stoney cold.

One winter a similar disaster struck at Great Uncle Mole’s; not so much that the water was cold, but that there was no water at all. Turn the taps as far as they would go – not a droplet. Frozen pipes you might think, but no. The water that was not in the bath had composed itself into a middle-sized lake on the kitchen floor.

I had never seen a mole quite so out of sorts as Great Uncle Mole was then. He drooped in his dressing gown and slippers; clutched his spongebag as if it might provide spiritual solace. Uncle Ratty sat him in his armchair next to the fire and corralled me into a rescue operation with towels and buckets.

It was a while before we could get hold of a new tank. Uncle Ratty brought up his old copper samovar and for the next week or so we washed in the steaming pine-cone smokey water boiled up in it.

When I faced my stoney cold bath last Sunday night I could feel Great Uncle Mole’s desolation and rather wished I had Uncle Ratty nearby.

I shrank my requirements. I had no samovar but boiled a kettle, and then another. And I remembered my late Mama telling me how the sound of the kettle coming to the boil had soothed me to sleep. It still soothes me.

And is there anything as wonderful as a bath after being without hot water for a week?