Saturday 6 May 2023
Being off mains water, even though you don’t have to pay for water, is not something to be recommended overall, I’d say. Our water does taste and feel special and spring water in your home is a lovely thing. But you still have to pay for waste (in the form of septic tank-emptying every few years) and, crucially, you have to deal with any problems entirely on your own. We are very much in the midst of a major problem. And we don’t really know what to do. We have water tanks in the house, as you’d expect, and we have a big holding tank up the garden. That is filled through a pipe that runs maybe two-hundred metres down the hills above, mainly underground. We know nothing about the spring, how big it is, how much water it could produce or what it looks like beneath the cover in a clearing at the edge of a ten-year-old re-planted forest. We don’t know if it has run out of water, is low on water or is fine and the issue is elsewhere.
Chris’s son, Sam, arrived yesterday so is also on strict water rations. On a positive note – clutching at straws a bit – we all now have a much greater appreciation of how much water we use and waste. Showers, baths, washing machines and the like, okay, that’s all kind of obvious; quite a lot of water. I often flush the loo what I now see as being for a completely pointless, merely aesthetic reason. I have been more conscious of excessive loo flushing in recent years though and I do flush less than I used to (for example, in “my” loo in London, moths sometimes end up in the water in the loo. I hate clothes moths, for obvious reasons, but I also don’t like seeing them floating in the toilet, so I flush the loo. Not necessary). But I know I have the mindset that we have water, we use it, we won’t run out. I have always felt uncomfortable when I stay in fancy hotels in India for work that when you use the loo in the lobby area, for example, there is a cleaning attendant who goes into the cubicle after you’ve been in (having already flushed), gives the loo a quick clean and flushes it again.
Anyway, we now have two more orange B&Q buckets to collect run-off water from mini-showers and before hot water kicks in for washing dishes. I strangely don’t mind doing that, it’s sort of satisfying to see how much water you can save. I did some washing up yesterday. The cold water I collected before hot water came through the tap enabled me to rinse off the bubbles without running more cold water. It’s all obvious stuff, I know, but it is a shocking reminder of how much water we use and waste. But also the extent to which we, in the UK, take the turning of a tap or the flush of a loo for granted without most of us contemplating how many small changes we could make to help with water reserves that are not what they once were due to climate change and so many other things that I doubt I could even imagine.
