You have no moral or legal obligation to grass on a hose-happy neighbour. If the water authorities have no way of policing a hosepipe ban, why introduce one? And, while it might be tawdry to douse your dahlias when everyone else in your neighbourhood is conserving water, there is something even more unseemly about squealing on them.

If you catch your neighbour committing murder or rape, then the argument for alerting the police is overwhelming. But watering his garden? If you’re minded to blow the whistle, the chances are that you’ve been seeking an excuse to settle an old score: squealing, here, becomes not so much a moral duty as a continuation of war by other means.

And if you do get on with your neighbour you should have the moral courage to stick by a friend, even if he has mildly transgressed. Who are you to act as judge and jury, when you have only a partial glimpse of the facts? A gardener might water his plants and still use less water than a neighbour who has ten, wholly permissible, baths a day. How do you reward — or at least not penalise — someone who selflessly goes dirty to nurture his roses? Blaming water customers for the lack of foresight by water companies is like Dick Cheney blaming that lawyer he shot when out quail-hunting for having a beaky nose and a squawky voice.

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