I didn’t have any water yesterday. That is, my flat didn’t. It was only for a couple of hours but they were crucial ones: breakfast and post-run. It was one of those nice little reminders of how good we have it, really. We may all have had to sell our second SUVs and postpone that holiday to the Seychelles (I know I have), steak’s down to once a week in many households and people have been forced to buy supermarket own-brand paté and Japanese rice-crackers. Things are tough, but at least we have running water. Until we don’t.
I didn’t and I panicked. How would I fill the kettle? How was I going to wash? Grim images of recycled saliva and extracting things from leaves filled my un-shampooed head. I was hard-pressed to come up with a solution. We don’t have witchetty grubs in Britain and even if we did, I’m vegetarian. It’s the credit crunch – damned if I was going to bathe in Perrier and make tea with Evian; not with the neighbours watching. That would be cheating. I would have to be inventive, and stoic, and wait until it snowed and melt that.
We rang Thames Water. Yes, there had been “an emergency” in our area which they “weren’t at liberty to discuss” but we “weren’t in any imminent danger”. That means that we probably were. Something had happened that had made them shut off the water and shut down the street, but we were alive and we should channel our gratitude for that fact into staying calm. I stayed as calm as a post-run sweaty woman without tea can do, listened intently for the return of the gurgling to the pipes, then had the nicest shower in the entire world and twenty gallons of tea. You know not the hour nor the day…
