Watery stuff

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up.

Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will come on and when they open the tap water will come out. In rural Spain that's not always the case. I suppose in rural Scotland it could well be the same. If you live a long way from power lines or water pipes then you're on your own. We have mains water and mains electric but not everyone in the countryside has. People have water storage tanks which have to be filled up from time to time by tanker lorry and lots of houses run off solar power either for environmental reasons or because they have no economic option.

Piped water around here comes as two variants. The stuff we have is drinking tap water. It comes filtered and treated. There is another network of water supply organised locally by S.A.T. Aguas de Pinoso, la Sociedad Agraria de Transformación. That network is designed for crop irrigation but, because it runs in places where the drinking water network doesn't some people use it as their primary water source. I think that it is basically filtered but I don't think it's suitable for drinking. That said I've made tea with it presuming that the boiled water would be safe. I wrote that section without checking the detail. I think it's correct but if it isn't I apologise now.

So, the last time I called Artemio was because I'd cut through a thinnish water pipe when I was hacking out weeds alongside our track. It turned out that it was a pipe our neighbour had laid himself to water his almond trees so I had to ring Artemio back and cancel. The time before that it was the public water supply and the water bubbling up through the soil was in the same place that it has bubbled up time and time again. "It's 30 year old pipe," said Artemio, "what do you expect? It goes time after time and we patch it up time after time too".

Interesting that about the pipe. We had a leak on our side of the water meter the other day. We got the original leak fixed and then the pipe, which is sort of semi rigid rubber, not quite the Durapipe type but not as flexible as hosepipe, sprang a pinhole leak. When I tried a temporary repair with some potty putty type epoxy resin the pipe sprang another leak. When the plumber finally got around to visiting he said that the pipe lasts for so long and then starts to fail; as if it had a sell by date. He also said that the piping which had failed, the stuff he was replacing, was thin walled agricultural pipe rather than the thicker walled domestic supply pipe. From the outside they would look identical if it were not for the blue pinstripe on the domestic stuff. He thought that we may have the thinner walled pipe from the meter to the stopcock in the house. He cheerily suggested that if it were beginning to go it may have reached the end of it's useful life. "Keep an eye on your meter." he said. 

I do check the water meter every week. I've heard far too many stories about unrecognised leaks leading to huge bills. I also pondered the pleasures of house ownership.

On our cistern

When I was a schoolboy I was told how the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans were responsible for lots of English place names; things like  -thorpe from the Norse for a village, as in Mablethorpe, and  -ham is from the Saxon for the same thing, as in Birmingham.

In 711AD North Africans invaded what is now Spain and they controlled at least part of the peninsula for the next 700 plus years. Obviously enough, during that time, they made their mark on the land and its people. In the Spanish language lots of words begin with "a" or "al". That's because the Arabic for "the" is "a" or "al".  Over times  the sound sort of fused - like the old advert,  Drinka Pinta Milka Day, or how, when I've finished this, I'll get a cuppa. If you know Spanish you'll be able to think of myriad words that begin in "a" like azúcar, almohada, albahaca or almirante. If you don't know Spanish think of some of the place names that you know like Almeria, Andalusia, Alhambra (like the theatre in Bradford). No?, alright then, think Alicante airport (ألَلَقَنْت or Al-Laqant).

We have one of those words in our back patio, we have an aljibe. An aljibe is a construction to hold water, a cistern. I suppose that at one time in the past it would have been the main source of drinking water for the house. This is not a well, it's a structure that collects rainwater, like a water butt. It holds about 11,500 litres of water or around 2,500 gallons. The down drain pipes from the roof lead directly into the aljibe so, when it rains, we collect the water. We don't use it for drinking water, we use it to water the garden, and we raise the water with a pump rather than the more traditional pulley and bucket. It was only relatively recently that I realised that the shopping centre down in Elche, which is called L’Aljub, is simply aljibe written in the local Valenciano language rather than the more common Castilian Spanish.

Our aljibe started to leak. The bricky who came to have a look said that it was because tree roots homed in on the water and forced their way through the concrete. It was true, hanging with my head well inside the pit I could see the straggly roots. The bricky put me right when I called it an aljibe. "It's not an aljibe, it's a cistern," he said. I presumed he would know, being local and a builder and such, but I can't find any Internet source that agrees with him, nobody except José Miguel makes any distinction. For instance the translation of the Wikipedia article says of the etymology of the word: the term aljibe ("algibe") comes from the hispanic arabic, alǧúbb, algúbb, and this from the classic Arabic جب, gubb, which means cistern, well or pit.

I don't really mind what the name is but I do often think about the careful husbandry of water inherited from those North Africans as I'm watering the garden and I feel quite righteous in not using good clean drinking water for the job.