Weekly Rundown: Without Water!

It's been an interesting week here at Chez Click, starting at 5am on Monday when I went to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, turned on the tap and nothing came out. Being a member of Generation Y, where all life's little problems can be solved by turning something off and back on again, I turned off the tap. I turned it back on again. Still nothing.

That's right.

The water was off. And I'd wasted our one flush of the toilet. Oops.

After wiping the liquid soap off my hand onto a flannel and washing my hands with a wet wipe, I went downstairs to inform the Mr of this news. Luckily he sets up the breakfast stuff the night before, including filling the kettle, so we weren't without our morning cuppa. Even more luckily, his parents are on a totally different water supply to us so we were able to fling on clothes and make a quick dash to use their running water.

It being 5am, we couldn't check with our neighbours if their water was off, but thanks to Facebook we were soon able to confirm that, yes, not only was our little rank of houses off, the big house was too!

Mount Stuart gets its water from a little loch about two or three miles from our house. It's totally different to the water in town. I mean, water's water, but then it's not. The water that comes out of our tap is softer somehow; it tastes soft and a little bit sweet, not chemically at all. Of course, when you run a bath after heavy rain it has a slight greenish tinge, but the smell of it is lovely; sometimes I don't even bother with bubble bath.

And aside from being nice to drink, and sniff, it's handy for other day to day things. Like washing up, doing laundry, and showering, all of which pretty much ground to a halt without our usual supply of the wet stuff.

Mount Stuart were very helpful, of course. We came home on Monday to a big pack of bottled water with a letter telling us what was going on (namely that the water supply should be back that evening), which was followed up with another letter a few hours later which basically said 'um, actually, looks like it's going to be tomorrow'.

Tuesday brought more bottled water and an arrangement that we could go take showers at a local hotel, should we feel that way inclined. I'm not sure how many residents took them up on that offer. I'd made a point of stopping in at my in-laws' for a shower on the way home on Monday (I'm possibly the world record holder for quick showers, Mr Click once timed me and I did it in ninety seconds – this is a skill I learned back before Sky+ was a thing, so I could nip in for a shower in the advert breaks of TV programmes).

When we got in on Tuesday evening the first thing I did was headed for the kitchen and turned on the tap, this had become a habit whenever we got in or moved, just in case it had come back on since we last checked. Imagine my delight when, after coughing and sputtering for a moment, actual water came out the tap. Sure, it was murky coloured and obviously undrinkable, but it was water. I actually took a glass of it out to the car to show Mr Click!

Never have I been so glad to see a glass of murky water.

As of yesterday the water has pretty much returned to normal, after a couple of days of being first murky and then cloudy. It's like our epic five-day power cut that I blogged about three and a half years ago when this blog was just a baby. It's not something I'd like to do again any time soon, but we survived. And I'm pretty grateful for our running water.


Now if I could just get caught up on this backlog of laundry!