3: Routines around water

This is the third in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in a Spanish angle.

We, well the house, has a cesspit. Nothing sophisticated, just a brick-lined hole in the ground. If we were to try and sell the house we'd have to do something about that. Legislation has changed in the years we've lived here. Now we'd either have to put in a decent septic tank or, more likely, dig a big trench to connect our house to the village drain that stops 200 metres from our front door. All the run-off from the washbasins, sink, showers and toilets goes into that cesspit, the black hole, and microorganisms do the rest. 

Lots of the toilets in Spanish bars, museums and the like have signs asking you to throw soiled toilet paper into a wastebasket. But, good Lord, we're British - we couldn't do that. What about the stench, what about the flies? No, we whizz the paper down the toilet and flush. On one occasion, that caused a problem. Basically, all the drains in, say, a bathroom or kitchen go to a central point beneath the floor of the room, the arqueta, and then join a single pipe which goes to the cesspit. In one of the en-suites, that arqueta trapped lots of unspeakable stuff. We found out because we'd had to break through the tiled floor to get to a leaking water inflow tube. With Marigolds, a bit of stretching and a lot of cursing I cleaned that out but, in order to stop the same thing happening again, I took to hurling a couple of bucketfuls of water down each of the toilets each week. 

We also have trouble with the hard water. The scale that builds up does a lot of damage. It blocks the flow reducing filters on the taps, the scale clogs up the inside of shower hoses and shower heads and it coats the heating elements of electrical water heaters with stone. One new kettle furred up so much within a month that it started to leak. I've now incorporated so many small tasks within the routine that what was once simply tipping a couple of bucketfuls now takes me around 40 minutes each week. 

Another water-related job is that I check our water meter every week to make sure that the use is more or less as expected. We've heard far too many stories of a leak on the consumer's side of the water meter that have run undetected for long periods, with resultant big bills. 

At the main stop valve, where the water comes into the house, we have a simple filter to catch at least some of the sediment. I check that every three months and change it as necessary. From that inlet point the water passes through a tube that ran, exposed, along the side of a North facing wall. The water used to freeze up several times over the winter, leaving us less fragrant for the day. When we realised why that was happening I wrapped the tube with insulation and I now check that insulation on a monthly basis, replacing jaded gaffer tape and adding bubble wrap as necessary. We didn't have a single day without water, because of frozen pipes, last winter though I suppose Global Warming may have loaned a helping hand there.

One last thing is that the our clean water supply, on the council owned side of the meter, comes in pipes that are varying depths below ground level. Every now and again a passing tractor or lorry damages the pipe and we lose our supply. There's 24 hour call out service provided by the town hall so it's not such a big deal but it can take a while to get sorted sometimes.

Hands numbed by cold, feet frozen and cursing.

We have an aljibe in our house. An aljibe is a sort of water cistern. Ours is about two metres deep so I suppose it's capacity is a bit under 9,000 gallons or 40 cubic metres. It collects the water from the roof gutters on our house. In the past these cisterns, and wells, were the water supply for country houses. Nowadays, we have mains water but the aljibe was useful for summer garden watering. Unfortunately the aljibe started to leak; it would only hold about 15cms of water. The rest went somewhere else. We suspected that the somewhere else was the source of the damp patch on one of our walls. Spanish houses, often damp proof course less, are prone to rising damp but we did think we should put up, at least, a token resistance.

A builder told us it was tree roots punching through the concrete to get to the water. A temporary fix was possible but the roots would be back. We tried and he was right. Someone else told us that fixing aljibes was a specialist job and with the falling demand and the way that older people retire and die there were none of those specialists still working. They suggested we sealed off the cistern.

In the end my solution was very Heath Robinson. I stopped the downpipes feeding into the aljibe and put plastic dustbins to collect the rainwater. I pumped all of the water I could from the aljibe and then bought a dirty water pump that automatically activates with rising water level and put it in one of the dustbins. There are two dustbins and only one pump so if the rain is heavy I have to go and get soaked as I move the pump from one bin to the other. The set up is not at all elegant but we reckoned that if the aljibe were the source of the damp patch that was the lesser of two evils.

We had a hailstorm the other day. The hail was so thick it looked like snow. Then it froze into a sheet of ice. As I passed the dustbins I realised they were full and brimming over. Slip sliding across the ice sheet I tried to get the pump working. It didn't want to. I had to read the manual to fix the problem. My hands were frozen, my feet were wet and numb. I expected to break my neck on the ice sheet. Eventually I pumped out the bins but I could hear water running into the aljibe. I opened the hatch and we were back to the 15cms of water. Enough had seeped in through the hinges on the hatch etc. More fighting with the pump, more icy cold water running onto my back from a dribbling roof gutter. It took ages but I emptied the cistern then I covered all the holes and seepage points. Black plastic sheeting held down with rocks added to the ugliness of the dustbin, trailing hose, water pump and dustbin setup.

I don't think it's a win. I suspect that aljibe has been collecting water for hundreds of years and it will find a way to maintain that tradition!

Routine

I try to be frugal with toilet paper. One sheet at a time if possible. It's not because I'm particularly mean, it's because toilet paper blocks up Spanish drains. I've never quite been able to bring myself to do that thing you are instructed to do so many times in Spanish "public" toilets, the ones in bars and the like, to put the soiled paper in the wastebasket. It just seems a bit too close to living in a cave and wearing skins.

That primness caught us out once though and we had to have the floor ripped up to clear the blockage. In order for that not to happen again I now go around our three bathrooms each week and tip buckets of water down the toilets, clean the hair from the plugholes and other routine things to avoid a reoccurence. When we have houseguests who use up a couple of toilet rolls in a weekend I'm hard pressed not to reprimand them sternly.

Our house is old but it's a bit like that bucket that has a new handle, a new bottom and a rewelded seam - there's not much of the original left. Almost everything has been rebuilt or altered while we've been here. We don't live in some sort of back to nature existence, we may have a cesspit and our electric supply may lack a bit of oomph, by British standards, but it's perfectly normal herabouts. Sometimes the low power needs to be taken into consideration. The pellet burner ignition system, for instance, seems to need all the power we have to set fire to the fuel so we have to remember not to boil the kettle until the pellets are aflame. Once it's lit though we can boil kettles, run tumble dryers and what not to our hearts content.

Obviously every house needs its routines. Cleaning out that pellet burner or changing the beds or doing the laundry are the sort of repetitive tasks that people do the world over but there are certain things that I do, on a regular basis, because of where and how we live.

For example I clean the leaves and other detritus from the drain in the back patio every month because one time, when the need to do so had never occurred to me, the torrential rain was too much for the semi choked drain and in minutes the yard turned into a paddling pool which lapped into our living room.

I check the water meter every week to make sure that we are using about the same amount and that the meter isn't spinning when we don't have any taps open. It hasn't happened to us but the stories of underground, unseen, tubing splitting and spilling water unchecked for weeks or months are legion. And the resulting water bills are eye watering. 

Whilst we're on pipes our water often used to freeze up when it got cold in Winter. The pipe runs along the side of a North facing wall so I put some foam insulation around the exposed pipe. That seemed to do the trick. No frozen water. But the plastic of the insulation didn't cope well with the weather and it soon split. So I added more insulation and then taped the whole lot up in the time honoured, WD40 or duct tap to fix everything, manner. Every month, I check that the foam and the tape are OK and I usually end up with a happy half hour balancing on a stepladder to rebandage the pipe. 

I'm not sure whether this falls into the same class. This may well be more like checking the tyre pressures and oil on the car or pruning the trees, raking up the leaves and hoeing out the invincible weeds. Just a routine. But our palm tree is under constant threat from the picudo rojo, a beetle type creature, that flies around looking for a place to lay eggs. Once the eggs hatch the larvae feast on palm trees. Every six weeks I strap on a backpack spraying kit and douse the tree.

I discovered a new routine just yesterday. We have a gas water heater for the showers. It started to cut out after a couple of minutes. Naked with soapy hair and freezing water is horrid. I was just about to call out the repair people when I realised that it only happened when I changed from tap to shower. The water here is hard. That's why I clean or change the inlet filters on the water supply every three months to keep the amount of limescale in the system down. If you don't clean out your kettle or use anti-lime tabs in your washing machine then you'll soon notice. Everything furs up. People are always having to change electric water heaters because the elements are, effectively, covered in stone. The problem in the shower was that when the water flow diminished some sort of safety mechanism cut in on the gas heater. All I had to do was clean out the shower head and the taps and it seems to have sorted the problem. I've put that job onto a four week cycle in my diary.

I don't remember doing anything of a like nature when I lived in the UK. Periodic jobs obviously but a routine to avoid potential problems, no.

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.

Do you think I need to take a brolly?

I mentioned a few posts ago that it hasn't rained a lot recently around here. Whenever if does rain someone always says -"Well, we need it," and that is about as true a truism as anyone could want. Spain is in the middle of a prolonged drought.

Drought occurs when, over an extended period, rainfall is lower than normal. Eventually, despite reservoirs, desalination plants, water recovery and the like, this results in a hydrological drought or lack of water resources. When this water scarcity affects agricultural, industrial and other economic activity we get to a socio-economic drought which is when your average Joe starts to notice. That's about where we are.

For some reason, presumably to do with the normal pattern of rainfall in Spain, the hydrographic year here runs from the start of October to the end of September. Between 1980 and 2010 the average rainfall in Spain was about 650 litres on every square metre. In the last hydrographic year the figure was 550 litres or some 16% down. There have been bad years in the past, in 2004 for instance it was just 430 litres, but the problem is that it's been drier than usual for four years in a row and that means that the amount of water stored in reservoirs has been steadily falling, we're in a hydrological drought.

In fact the reservoirs are well below 40% of their storage capacity. To be honest this figure seems a strange way to report water capacity. Spain has the highest per capita reservoir capacity in the world. To say that the reservoirs are at 37% of capacity means nothing - do we have a lot of capacity, so there's plenty left for me to drink and for the farmers to pour onto their crops, or are we down to the last few cupfuls? The mug I drink tea from is pretty big, about half a litre, plenty of tea to wash down my breakfast toast but if I needed to drink a bucket of tea every morning, and presuming that the blue 15 litre bucket in our garage is typical, that mug would represent just over 3% of my tea habit needs.

Hydrologically Spain is divided into river basin areas. The one that affects us, in sunny Culebrón is the Jucar and the one next door, the Segura. They're at around 25% and 14% of capacity - the lowest figures in the whole of Spain. Again though that percentage figure has to be analysed rather than taken at face value. Up in Galicia for instance, where it normally rains a lot, there is not, usually, the need to store so much water because the stuff falls out of the sky pretty regularly. The storage figure for the Miño-Sil basin in that region is just over 42% but that represents much more of a supply problem than the 32% capacity for the Guadalquivir basin in Andalucia.  That's because it's often pretty dry in Andalucia so they have lots of reservoirs to store the water when it does come. In fact some restrictions on water use have been put into place in some of the traditionally wetter parts of Spain like Galicia and Castilla y León. Apparently they haven't had any rain at all in Valladolid, not a drop, in over 100 days for instance.

Last year at this time there were just short of 28,000 cubic hectares of water stored in reservoirs. This year it's about 22,000 cubic hectares, some 22% down. The water stored has three principal uses. For agriculture, for the urban centres and for hydroelectric generation. Agriculture uses about 85% of the water and the urban centres about 15%. The hydroelectric generation just borrows it for a moment or two. It's been a bad year for agriculture. The sector has had trouble with frosts, with hailstone damage (I've told you about the horrible hailstorms before) and the drought. Farmers reckon they've lost about 2,500,000,000€ of retail sales because of those three things. Mind you it's not all one way traffic. Farmers are allegedly responsible for an estimated half a million illegal water wells which use about the same amount of water as 58 million people in a year. Hydroelectric generation is down about 50% this year because the dams don't have the flows to drive the turbines. This means that other, non renewable and more costly, forms of energy, like gas and coal, have to be used to fill the gap and that, in turn, means more greenhouse gases - up 37% for this year over 2016.

I wondered how much rainfall would be needed to turn this situation around. None of the articles I read had a figure. It took me a long time to work out why. The answer is that nobody can really say without lots of ifs and buts. For instance Spain has systems for moving water from one river basin to another. Water is often moved from the Tajo to the Segura for instance so, I suppose, if the drought persisted in Murcia but it poured down in the Tajo basin then Murcia would be fine. Also you would need to establish what's normal in the way of full and empty reservoirs and whether the reservoirs or aquifers are the main source of supply. The highest figure I can see for reservoir capacity seems to be 70% in 2013, just before the dry spell started. If you were one of those half empty people, rather than half full people, then I suppose you could, quite rightly, point out that even in the fattest years the reservoirs were 30% below full. I'm pretty sure though that, a few years ago, one of the complaints in the North was that they had run out of storage capacity because all the reservoirs were full. That ties in with the point above about the Miño-Sil river basin. Full to overflowing in the lusher parts, still only at 50% in the drier parts but, in fact, all well and good. Actually I did find an article that said in Galicia it needed to start raining now and not stop until they had about 600 litres per square metre or about half a years average rainfall to bring things back to normal. That doesn't sound good.

But not to worry the Government has said that no cuts in supply are envisaged until 2018 - hang on isn't that just a bit short of 40 days away?

Tealess for hours

A few years ago I used to take photos of houses and write the descriptions for an estate agency here in Spain. Often, if it were a house in the countryside, the sellers would tell me how they had spent loads of money on putting in piped water or connecting the house to the electricity grid. I had to be careful how I told them that all that money was irrecoverable. If they hadn't done it the house would have been worth less – off grid houses or with tanked rather than live water are less popular than the connected ones - but nobody pays extra because a house has electric and water. When you click the switch you expect the current to flow, when you open the tap there should be water. Utilities, like roofs, are things you expect in a house.

There was a little piece on the Town Hall website the other day about improving the water supply to some little hamlet and there was a picture of the pipe. It wasn't a very big pipe maybe 6 or 7cms in diameter. It wasn't very high tech either, just some thickish looking plastic pipe. I suppose that something similar feeds the water to our house. Yesterday though it didn't.

If there is leak on the householder's side of the water meter you call a plumber. If it's on the other side then you call the bloke who drives around in a big white Jeep and works for the Town Hall. He usually comes quickly, digs up the road and patches the leak. It happens from time to time.

I didn't worry too much when the tap was empty. The water pressure has been pathetic for a couple of weeks now and I presumed they were doing some routine maintenance to sort that out. Just to be safe though I sent a text to the Jeep man. I didn't ring because I didn't want to pester a man who might be, almost literally, up to his neck in it

Our Internet and phone connection had gone phut the day before. I suspected a general fault rather than a household problem. I used the WhatsApp group in the village to ask if other people were having problems. The answer was yes, which was both re-assuring and not at the same time. The phone and the internet connection came back. Somebody said a mast had collapsed but I don't know.

I must have been a bit too blasé about the water for Maggie's liking. She wasn't as confident as me. She used the same village WhatsApp group to ask about the water. Yes it was a general problem. A couple of hours later the water came sucking, blowing, popping and gurgling back. It was very cloudy and the pressure was pathetic.

We heat our water with a gas water heater powered by bottled gas. We chose gas because our rural electric supply is a bit on the feeble side. I thought we had the hot water supply secured but, this morning, the water pressure was so feeble that the water heater refused to kick into life. Cold shower or no shower were the options.

Civilization hanging by a thread or the delights of rural life in Spain?

Fear stalks the land

The stories of huge water bills in Spain are legion. Not for the cost of the water, which is usually very reasonable, but for undiscovered leaks.

Everyone in Spain has a water meter. Leaks on the supply side, before the water meter, are the problem of the supplier but, once past the meter, the problem is yours.

The water supply to our house is not sophiticated. A plastic tube is buried in a shallow trench under the dirt road that passes the house and a spur brings water to our meter. Our supply is no more than a thick plastic hose buried only inches under the garden. When it gets cold we often lose water for a while until the pipes unfreeze. Because of this I check the water meter regularly to make sure that the consumption seems reasonable and normal. The past couple of times the reading has been a bit high. Six or seven cubic metres instead of the usual three or four. I didn't worry too much. We've run the irrigation system on the garden a couple of times and there is a more general use of the hosepipe to water plants here and there. We also use an aljibe, a big rainwater tank, to water the garden but even then a few hundred gallons from the piped supply seemed explicable.

Maggie said to me the other day though that she could hear the sound of water running in the tubes. Sure enough, with an ear pressed to the wall, it was obvious. I checked the meter carefully and it was confirmed; the smallest needle was creeping inexorably round.

All of our pipework is buried under concrete floors and behind ceramic tiles. Unless it was a simple problem with the taps we were going to be smashing tiles and digging up floors. Yesterday the plumber confirmed the worst. It wasn't the tap. We needed to reveal the pipework and the plumber suggested a builder who came and smashed the marble in the shower cubicle, cutting his hand in the process. The leak wasn't in the uncovered pipes.

This was bad. Sleepless night bad. Something else would have to be dug up, maybe the floor of the shower, maybe the tiled floor. The plumber came back today with a man who had a listening device to find the source of the leak. He found it and the plumber has now dug up the floor of our bedroom to reveal the dodgy pipework. He's still in the middle of doing it as I type. He's gone to get specialist soldering kit.

The good news is that he's found it. Even better he found it underneath the first tile he lifted and he's only had to dig up two tiles to gain access. The bad news is that we have no spares for the tiles dug up and whilst it's a common design the chance of getting an exact match are slight. In the walk in shower the destroyed marble is going to be hard to replace too.

Well, said the plumber, at least you won't need a boat now but maybe you'll need a new rug.

Luxury

I painted the front door last week. I did an awful job; all runs and dead flies. Maggie and I agreed that it looked better than before though. Anyway it was bucolic, rustic, in keeping with our living situation.

Our electric supply is a bit rural too. When we moved in, we were smart enough to put our cooking and weater heating onto gas. True, we have to lug the gas bottles about but we don't have circuit breakers popping all the time.

The hot water isn't as hot in winter as in summer. Insulation is not common in our part of the world so we were not at all surprised that the water was cooler in the colder months. It had to pass through all that cold earth. We weren't surprised either that the water got hotter more quickly in one bathroom than the others - more cold ground = cooler water for longer.

We've had some lovely weather recently. High 20s and sunny so and I was a bit surprised that the hot water was more like tepid water. Shower time was not a pleasure. Grease stuck obstinately to the cutlery as we washed up. It took us days to decide that it wasn't just rural it was a problem. I tried some home solutions but, eventually, we called Jesús, the plumber. At first he was stumped too. We had water, we had gas, the boiler was lighting up, why was the water not hot enough? He found the fault though, an intermittent fault. He's fixed it now and the water is scalding hot.

It's amazing how luxurious it feels to have hot water.

Services

When I put the clocks back later tonight I'm going to retune the telly. The way the frequencies are divided up between mobile phone services and TV networks is being changed so it's either a laborious retune (splendid design Samsung people!) or lose channels. TV is one of the few things we generally get as well here as anywhere in Spain.

My phone provider sent me one of those super offers the other day. For just two euros more per month I could have 40 new TV channels, increase the ADSL speed to a maximum of 100 Mb and get double the number of download gigs on my mobile phone. I tried to sign up. None of the advantages were available here in Culebrón - no 4G, no fibre, not even the TV channels. That's what you get for living in the countryside. ADSL at 3 Mb maximum and a dodgy mobile signal.

When I worked at the furniture shop my boss had a go at house selling. I used to take the pictures and write the blurb for the sales sheets. Lots of people who lived up some unmade track would tell me that they'd spent so many thousands on bringing in mains water or having the placed hooked up to the power grid. When you live in the middle of nowhere you suddenly realise that these things are good. The trouble is that for buyers, these services are as basic as walls and a roof and add no value whatsoever to the sales price of a house.

We have running water. Not the hardly purified agricultural water that some country houses get by on but proper clean water. They are running a gas pipeline pretty close to our house. It will take piped gas from Monóvar to Pinoso and on to Algüeña. There will be no little spur to our village so we will have to continue lugging gas bottles around. We suspect that one of the diggers or lorries damaged our water pipes. We had a couple of days of intermittent water and pressure so low that the gas water heater wouldn't fire up. Cold dribbly showers are horrid even in the relative warmth of this October.

They put drains in the village a few years ago. The nearest access point was about 300 metres from our house. They told us we could connect up to it if we wished but we'd have to dig our own trench and put in our own pipework. We decided to stick with our septic tank even though it sometimes smells a bit. That didn't stop them charging us 45€ per year for drainage costs though.

The electric supply is a bit ancient too. We get a lot of power cuts, generally only a couple of minutes but not always. We only have 2.2 Kw of supply. The Spanish word for electric isn't electric - it's light. That's because that's what power was for most houses at first. A dim 25w bulb to rival the candles and oil lamps of earlier generations. Our Twenty First Century 2.5 Kw electric kettle would blow the circuit breakers on our 1970s power supply every time we fancied a cuppa if it were not for a bit of skullduggery on our part. Long before the palm tree was menacing the supply we talked with our neighbour about bringing in more power. The price was around 18,000€ so we all quietly forgot about it.

Life in the country is lovely - great views. But sometimes as the internet grinds slowly, the water dribbles, the lights dim and the gas heater sputters to a halt waiting for a new bottle I forget all about those views and long for a nearby bar and tarmac underfoot.

Rivers, water and the like

Spain has the highest number of reservoirs per inhabitant in the world. At least that's what it says on Wikipedia. I am always wary of these superlatives. I remember hearing in the UK that NHS Blood and Transplant was the best service in the world and I wondered what their criteria were for that statement. My mum is also the best mum in the world. I bet you, mistakenly, thought yours was.

My unchecked and unverified perception is that it is generally pretty sunny in Spain in summer. It is especially sunny along the Mediterranean coast. I hear it even stops raining in Galicia and the rest of Northern Spain in summer. You might think that a hot dry country like Spain would have water supply problems.

Whilst we have lived here there were, a few years ago, some restrictions on the agricultural use of water. It wasn't a big thing though - we were on the verge of trouble rather than in trouble. The last big problems that I can find reference to were down in Andalucia in the mid 1990s. Given that it is sunny and hot that seems to suggest pretty good organisation of water to me. Maybe that reservoir number information was right. Apparently Franco liked building dams. One of his nicknames was Paco the frog which came from his liking for water. Back in 2001 the Aznar Government came up with a plan that was going to move water from the River Ebro, in the North, through a series of pipes and canals down to the drier, southern, parts of Spain. The Catalans and the Aragonese were not keen on this plan. In 2004 the new Zapatero government shelved the Aznar plans and decided to build desalination plants instead. The Valencians and Murcians were not keen on this plan. The graffiti about the "trasvase," the transfer plan, is still clear on many walls all over this area. The plan also had provision for building another 120 reservoirs.

One of the news items during the periods when it doesn't rain as hard or as often as it should is a bulletin on the state of the "Basin Agencies." These Confederaciones Hidrográficas are generally based on river basins and I think there are fourteen or fifteen in total. The reserves are usually expressed as a percentage of capacity  so, for instance, today in the internal Basque Country the level is 95.24% of capacity and for the Ebro it's 85.84%. Healthy figures. The one that matters to us, the Segura basin,  is at 70%. Last year at the same time the Segura's reservoirs were at 49% and the 10 year average is just 32% so one good wet Spring and we have water to burn. Back in the Spring I heard some chap on the radio being asked about the state of the Segura river. He was almost gleeful about the rain. "I had to open sluices on some reservoirs today," he cackled. "Water enough for three years," he boasted.

The Segura goes through Murcia. It looks like a river there by the Whale sculpture and, when I think about it, where it flows into the Med. at Guardamar it still looks quite river like. Certainly it looks more like a river than the mighty Vinalopó, our most local river and the one which gives geographical names to this region. For most of the the Vinalopó is nothing more than a dirty trickle of water.

Despite being aware of the Segura as a name and even having visited several places along its banks I had never really noticed it as a river until yesterday. That's because yesterday I couldn't fail to notice it. I paddled down it in an inflatable boat for 13kms, watched ducks float by at an impressive velocity and, as I stood in it, I felt the swirl of small pebbles bombarding my legs as they were carried along by the current.

None so blind as those who will not see.