You’re trying to keep cool and you’re also trying to make sure the garden survives, even if you’ve already abandoned the clearly futile – and wasteful – attempts to keep the front lawn green.

Those times when water is in the greatest demand obviously coincide with the times when we use the most.

That doesn’t mean the water-wise message hasn’t sunk in over the past few years, given that for many they now tend to gardens that –  thanks to plant selection and a re-think of outdoor entertaining areas – no longer resemble an Antipodean version of a lush English backyard retreat.

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Given also the clearly devastating impact the current drought has had on our farming community and the smaller towns in outlying areas, it would seem the height of selfishness to not change your ways.

Much of that is rooted in the Border region’s previous big dries.

Indeed, the Murray Darling Basin Authority – in a press conference beside an almost empty Lake Hume a decade ago – warned that this was the way of the future.

Our hotter climate, it said, meant that such vast inland storages were unlikely to fill to capacity again.

Thankfully, that is not the way things have panned-out in the years since, with enough extra-wet years helping to do just that for both Hume and Dartmouth.

Lake Hume, after a very dry run of months and with the demand of irrigators, has dropped to around the 30 per cent mark, though North East Water’s Craig Heiner says this still means the storage and others are well-placed.

Nevertheless, Mr Heiner says the community still needs to be extremely watchful. Another dry winter and spring could make for a return to water restrictions by the end of 2019

It is heartening to hear that the old water-wise ways instilled in us by the millennium drought meant our consumption has been lower than back in the 1990s.

But is an approach we must continue, for the sake of us all.