Our bucket economy

25 years ago Lilliput Press published Lives Less Ordinary 32 Irish Portraits by Peter Morgan and Judy Kravis (1999). It's still in print but you can get 2nd hand copies for £5 or thereabouts. It's an amazing record of alternative folk living their own peculiar dream in the later 20thC. I've mentioned the book before especially wrt the chapter about Judith Hoad who lived in a remote cottage without indoor plumbing.

We have, so, indoor plumbing; although Old Ray, who died out of the house in 1994, managed without those amenities for 50 years. When we came with our modern ways and two small children we had a bore-hole drilled and sunk a submersible pump 100 ft =30m below grade. From that central heating was installed so we had hot&cold running water, not only in the house but also in two sheds - and a stand-pipe in the yard for watering walkers and sheep. On Sunday 7th Apr, the water stopped running. Even after I cleaned out the sclerotic pressure valve, the pump would switch off a couple of minutes after reset.

I called Roy the plumber and he came (in the drizzle) the next day for a scoping visit. He has promised to come today to sink the new submersible pump and connect it up.

We are not strangers to waterlessness because, like, the submersible pump runs on electricity and maintenance- or storm-scheduled power cuts stop all taps. It's all do-able for a few days so long as fore-thought has provided some back-up drinking water in bottles. It's disconcertingly convenient to have a 'lec'kettle that works next to a tap that don't. During our bucket week we instituted a parallel system for kettles on the wood-burning stove: 1) for drinking and cooking water 2) for washing and hottle bottles. But it's been well soggy this weather and we're getting hectolitres of clean clear rain water captured by 150 sq.m. of polytunnel roof -  I'd have no compunction about drinking that . . . ignoring the leaves. It is comical to imagine over-educated, over-aged me tottering down the steps from the tunnel with a bucket in each claw.

All good fun until, like a bucket-economy friend of ours in The West, who on the morning To The Compost trip, went all literal and tripped dropping >!kaPLOOSH!< the brimming family pee-bucket at the head of the stairs. Mercifully 'e didn't follow the bucket on down.