Saturday 4 February 2023
It’s 07:56 in New Delhi, the curtains to my hotel room are open and I can see the tops of trees, two very high Metro bridges and sky that is a pollution-filled yellow brown below and pale blue above. I can hear what sounds like a motorway (a loud, busy dulled, constant roar of traffic) and regular pipping of horns (normal Delhi street noise). Near my window, there are frequent fly-pasts, either pigeons or hawks. Weirdly, the seeming-forest of trees that my room is high above and the presence of birds of prey makes it ‘seem’ like Scotland (hahaha, that’s pushing it) whereas the traffic noise and distant Metro make it seem like Lewisham (but so not).
I have been thinking a lot about my sense of home since I’ve been here. To my surprise, I don’t picture the flat in London or the house in Scotland, it’s a genuine mash-up of the two, though I’m increasingly thinking it’s the stuff of London that forms a large element of my sense of home and the house in Scotland that feels like it will be home. As for the immediate surroundings, hands down it’s the trees, space, hills, clean rivers that I picture and, unsurprisingly with the pollution, dirt and noise here, long for.
This is a work trip, though we have unexpectedly not started work since our arrival in the very early hours of Tuesday morning. So, actually, we have been having days of leisure, which I feel guilty about, though it’s not our fault. As a result, we have been out and about in Delhi for the past four days. Yesterday, I posted my blog from, coincidentally, 3 January, so exactly a month earlier. I looked at Scotland photos of Chris and I on the beach at North Berwick the previous day. We were wearing multiple layers. I also looked at photos taken around the house at that time, with remnants of ice around and muddy earth. I then looked at some photos on my phone that I’d taken in Delhi. Wow, colour, sunshine (more in the sense of totally different kind of light; it was sunny in North Berwick too), a constant stream of traffic, people and general goings-on.
The massive contrast between my surroundings here compared to either of my two most familiar parts of the UK has made me realise that, however privileged and lucky we are to have two homes for a while, spending time in places that are completely different is massively important. This is my first trip to India since early February 2020 (almost exactly three years to the day since I was last in Delhi) and it was somewhere I visited regularly, more than twenty times in the three years prior to lockdown. I don’t think I have ever loved it so much, though I have always enjoyed Delhi. Coming somewhere so completely different to Scotland, but also to London, I feel energised by the change. We have been out to some of my favourite places to eat, had amazing food (all Indian, except for yesterday’s main meal, which was from a Japanese-Chinese-Thai restaurant), been shopping (the house will be a little more colourful once I’m home) and walked a lot. No matter how happy I am in my home surroundings, I think, if you have the means or the opportunity, going abroad, travelling, is almost vital to give you the opportunity to re-appreciate where you are, to enjoy the excitement of different sights, sounds and smells and to generally feel enlivened.
In the meantime, back in Scotland, the house has no water from the spring so Chris is currently at home trying to sort that out. I may have mentioned a week or so ago how great it was having our own spring, hahahahahaha. When it’s your own water supply, it’s your own problem to deal with. The latest is that digging to find the pipes will commence on Sunday in order to find where the (presumed) leak is, which is losing the water somewhere between the water tank in our garden and into our house. This is not quite the “PS” it seems from my having written it at the end of this post, it is a massive issue. We have no water supply. I do feel stressed about it, and it’s obviously far worse for Chris, who got back to the house on Thursday (the neighbour told us about the absence of water as he also has access to the spring for his barn and the water supply stopped).
The most likely cause in the circumstances (ie we weren’t even at home and using water when it stopped and there are no problems with the pipes from the spring below the woods down to the water tank in our garden, where the pipes are dug deeper) is rodents eating their way through the pipes, which apparently aren’t particularly deep through the garden. So, in order for, most likely, a plumber to be able to fix the leak, we have to first find the leak ourselves. I half jokingly told Chris I’d get back from India and not leave London for Scotland if the water supply weren’t back on. Chris reckons the leak won’t be found by then. Yikes. I think it will be. In the meantime, we have 1,700 litres of water in the hot tub ready for the (now postponed) hot tub engineer (the one with the hot tub injury). And, yes, we have wondered whether the filling of the hot tub caused some of the issues (the boiler issue from mid-January, for example). I do feel bad not being around for our biggest challenge to date, but there’s nothing I can do. I will enjoy my weekend in Delhi.
