Tuesday 4 July 2023
Chris, Angela and I drove to Kirkcudbright (“kir-coo-brie”) yesterday, had lunch, a walk around the marina and old town and Angela and I circumnavigated a coastal pathway around St Mary’s Isle. We had rain, sun, wind, chilly, hot; a reminder we are in Scotland in summer. Chris and I have recently been going out to already-familiar places so, although we’ve been to Kirkcudbright before (a year ago, when we viewed a few houses in and around Kirkcudbright), it was really good to go somewhere different.
I used to be (well, it’s still my default preference) a morning person for going out for the day: get going early, get back correspondingly earlier. Since living here, particularly since daylight has been significantly longer, we’ve had much slower, less rushed mornings, then gone out and got back later. We set off after eleven yesterday. I would usually have been out the door by nine. It’s neither good nor bad, but I’m surprised I’ve been okay with it. In part though, it does matter less around here because there aren’t the rush hours in the same way, or at least not en route to the nearest towns.
While we were out, Mitch (our, haha, estate manager; that’s the status he’s been elevated to in our eyes) went up to our spring to try again what hadn’t quite worked on Sunday, pressure-pumping air up and down the top section of pipe between the spring and the beginning of our pipe and the join at the one exposed bit of pipe roughly 100m down from the spring. Soon after we got home, Mitch came down from the spring and I went up to the tank with him. The joy. Seriously. He’s got water flow back into our tank. Considering there have been various issues since January with our water supply, I’m not as optimistic as I’d like to be about there being an end to our problems for now (seems almost inevitable we’ll run out of water later in August, or at best be down to a drip or trickle). However, it’s a big step in the right direction that the problem (airlocks being the current issue) and the location of the problem have been identified and we all now know significantly more about our water supply. I do still have a niggle that the start of this particular run of issues was actually a leak rather than no flow, but, erm, hey ho.
This morning, Angela is heading home for the long drive down to Kent. I might get a lift a few miles down the road to have a walk back, but otherwise it’s back to work.