Friday 23 June 2023
It’s raining. This is good news for the health of our spring, but a bit annoying because we have friends coming round for dinner and I’d planned to cook marinated lamb chops on the chimenea outdoors. But, in these drought-y times, rain is better than chimenea-cooked lamb.
As for the water, it’s still dripping but a bit less than yesterday. We are down to about 44cm of water, of which only about 20cm are above the outlet pipe. Chris found a report that there are two rivers in Scotland that are perilously low, impacting animals and livelihoods, one of those being the Esk, which is the one our main river is connected to. I read a lot yesterday about private water supply springs, the water table and how water can be extracted for private usage. I understand more than I did and now see that our spring is high up because it will be a spring within a certain kind of rock. It is unconnected to the ground-level water table but forms part of a perched water table, so is reliant on rainwater, with snow melt being particularly significant. This winter, there wasn’t much snow, though there was a lot of ice and rain. But it has been significantly drier than usual. I also read that it takes more than just a few days’ worth of rain to top up springs enough to get a resumption of normal-flowing water. I am ever so slightly reassured that we have a continuous drip of water going into the tank from the spring.
This afternoon, while it wasn’t raining, I wanted to try out the chimenea. It hasn’t been used for years and was out in sub-zero conditions all winter, though I had wrapped it in a blanket, bubble wrap and a cover. I put some sand in the bottom, followed some YouTube advice on lighting a chimenea (seemed far less approximate than my attempts previously) and lit an exemplary chimenea fire. I then cooked some sausages and we had sausage sandwiches, with toasted marshmallows for dessert. The sausages looked charred but they were surprisingly tasty and I had managed to cook the inside yet not incinerate them. I was very pleased with myself. One marshmallow dropped onto the grass and I’m convinced a bird will have had some kind of melty marshmallow experience, like glue its beak together or something. It’s ever so gluey, a toasted (slightly scorched) marshmallow.
In the sunshine yesterday, in the spirit of testing things, I tried out one of our new stripy deckchairs while doing some research (reading). Probably the most comfortable and practical deckchair ever (the sun shade top is genius!). Very enjoyable research session.
I have put up some very makeshift midge netting over the non-Velux windows. I am not convinced all midges have failed to get in somehow, but I’m sitting with the windows open in my office and I’m almost chilly. Upstairs in this house gets hot and it’s really good to be able to open windows. The birds, however, particularly the swallows, are unbelievably loud and sometimes sound like they’re in the room. It is definitely a good change from kids playing/screaming in the courtyard below and London street noise.