Tuesday 6 June 2023
Not only is it June, it’s the sixth day already. Yesterday morning looked misty enough to rain (nothing) and we had a few drops of rain at around 6am this morning; I’m not expecting more. The things on my mind right now as I think about what to write are water (sigh), the community council meeting and AGM Chris and I attended last night in a village hall and midges. None of these are concerns of mine in Lewisham, though there are mosquito issues there.
Water. I have had a very friendly and useful email exchange with the private water supply specialist who visited us on Wednesday. He’d asked for an update on our water situation so I told him everything that had happened, including that we had decided to take the advice of the former owner of the house and turn the water supply from the spring to our water tank off for three days to sort the airlocks. I also explained why I wasn’t convinced by that approach, saying that my plan was to turn it back on before the tank ran out so as not to cause airlocks from lack of water inside the house. I had also asked him about getting a bigger or back-up water tank. Ours is about two-thousand litres and we’ve been wondering about a ten-thousand-litre tank. He explained that there would be other issues with that – preventing stagnation, bacteria build-up in the water and temperature control – but that they could be dealt with but, as he put it, at a cost (and I think he meant more than just financial).
As for turning the water supply off to try to deal with air bubbles, he said he agreed with me that it was unlikely to make much difference and that, yes, it should be turned back on before the tank emptied. Although our pipe from the spring to the tank carries water down a hill, it is not a completely downhill pipe. For example, there is one bit of pipe that is visible and which looks like it’s horizontal. I am also concerned that the water from the spring will now be rising out of the area around the spring, which is a problem currently because water levels are very low at the moment.
So, my plan today (once the sun is out and the midges are resting) is to go back up to the spring to see if there is more water than the drought-usual down the rivulets (that once were more like streams). I will then turn the tap on to release water into our tank. It was about 62cm full yesterday morning and should be quite a bit less today as we have had two more showers, dishwasher, an occasional toilet-flush and usual water usage for hands and dishes.
We are learning a lot about water supplies and springs and water usage. It’s not an entirely bad time, strangely.
At the AGM and meeting last night, there were about eight council members and maybe thirty or so locals attending. We had expected to recognise quite a few people from the surreal Heyzeus rocky grungy gig we attended there in March, but we only recognised one couple, a woman we had talked to while walking around the marshes once and Mitch. The meeting itself was more charged and, at times, confrontational than I imagined and there were quite a lot of under-the-breath comments and digs. It was quite tense, which kind of made it more interesting. I feel bad saying that, but it did go on for two hours, which was a long time and under-breath comments made it easier to keep up with the goings-on. I felt sad that there are clearly a lot of long-running issues, conflicts of interest and what seem to me to be – well, put it this way, a lot of funding for, say, protected nature reserve-type areas comes from the industries that damage them most, wind farms and forestry. I had no idea how much money land owners receive for each wind turbine they allow to be constructed on their land. It’s staggering. Sadly, Scotland does not need more wind turbines as it currently has no means of directing that power to places that need it, such as England. Oh, it’s a big, controversial issue and a lot of people make a lot of money out of it. Anyway.
As for the midges, the upstairs of the house has been largely sealed off for twenty-four hours. I think there are fewer midges around but we both got bitten in the night again. We are officially at war with the midges. I am covered in bites.