Water, Water………

Last week was one of those weeks when I began to wonder if I had broken a mirror without knowing about it, and was having the reputed seven years bad luck in seven days! It started off with our daughter, Nikki, having a very nasty bug, so she came home for me to look after her and our two young grandsons. This was complicated by the fact that they were in the process of moving from a rented house back onto their beloved canal boat. Nikki was fretting that her poor husband, Ewan, was left to do the packing, this did not aid her recovery! Our Down’s Syndrome son, John-Paul, succumbed to an unpleasant throat infection, he was very poorly and due to his level of mental disability has to be treated like a small child when ill. One of the cars developed an ignition problem and was stuck on the drive. The cheerful Honda dealer told us it would cost £350 to fix when we figured out how to get it that far! Just as I thought things couldn’t get much worse, they did! We have a very old water main running under our property, it was leaking and in need of repair. My husband, David, and helpful neighbour, Les, located the leak and set about repairing it. Unfortunately as soon as they had sorted out one section of pipe another sprung a leak. To cut a long story short, we will have to replace the whole pipe and now have no water connected to the house!!

Water is a commodity we all take for granted. It is incredible the amount we use during normal domestic activity. Lugging buckets of water for flushing the loos from the standpipe we have set up in the garden, is no fun at all. We can’t use that water for drinking as the supply is contaminated by rust from the leaky pipe. We are getting estimates from drainage experts, but it seems that there are many complications, wouldn’t you know it! It looks as if we will be without a proper domestic water supply for a few weeks. Fortunately our curate daughter, Paulette, has ridden to the rescue and is putting us up in her home 40 miles away. Her parents have their uses, and in return for her kindness we have volunteered to paint her kitchen and deliver the parish leaflets notifying the locals of the Easter services!

On a positive note, Nikki has recovered and has sailed away, with her family, on their canal boat. John-Paul is his usual smiling and happy self once more. David decided that the only way to get the car ignition to turn was to use brute force, this has worked, and now we will be able to get it to the dealer to be fixed properly! HAPPY DAYS!!!!!!!!!