Sunday 7 May 2023
I got up and went to fill two toilet-flushing buckets of water from the hot tub – long story – and carried on up the hill to check on our water tank. As I passed our little stream, which has been little more than a trickle for the past month or so, I could hear it and then see that it was behaving as a miniature waterfall should behave. I felt ridiculously elated. At the water tank, which yesterday got down to a centimetre or two below the top of the outlet pipe (ie the pipe that sends our only water supply down to the house), it was about two centimetres above the top of the outlet pipe. I felt jubilant, really.
Chris, Sam and I have been flushing the loo with buckets or letting things mellow where appropriate. Showers have been as brief as we can tolerate and as much run-off water collected as possible. Washing dishes has probably been the most frustrating thing to do. Google suggested that a dishwasher would use the least water. However, we filled the dishwasher, then realised that a water-saving hand wash would use far fewer litres of water so the dishwasher is currently full of dirty dishes.
Our cheery orange B&Q buckets are twelve litres. On that basis, a toilet flush is probably about five to seven litres. The cold water before hot water in the shower is probably about five litres. When brushing my teeth, I used to – and I do emphasise “used to” – usually keep the tap running. That run-off, which I’m now doing with the hot tap so I can eventually get to the hot water, is about three-and-a-half litres.
See, I knew I would become a water bore.
Sam, being a student, is a late riser and a late go-to-bedder. While waiting for Sam to get up yesterday morning, in between trips to the water tank and conversation about the water tank, Chris and I sat around in the living room, reading and, as Sam would put it, chilling. I feel we don’t really do that these days, and I enjoyed it.
Later on, we went to Samye Ling, the Tibetan temple down the road. I wasn’t sure what a nineteen-year-old would make of it. We all sat in silence in the temple, with the same man meditating (again? Still? A statue?) and not moving as had been there a few days earlier when we’d been with Fiona and Andy. Afterwards, Sam sat on a log looking across the confluence of the two Esk rivers. He said later that he’d enjoyed the quiet, saying he never really “heard” that kind of quiet. It may seem like we go there a lot, and we kind of do, but it definitely feels calming to wander around and I love being there.
Today, we’re hoping for torrential rain once we get back from a day out.
I am still amazed that daffodils are still out in early May.
