Diary of a Midlife Bore: My Week in Review

Digging deeper and unearthing leaks.

Hello folks, I thought it might be fun (for me) to start keeping a journal of life up here.

To me April always feels like a time for new starts, spring has sprung and all that. Well the daffodils are out at least. I made this decision yesterday and wanted to dive straight in, so here goes.

Monday 1st - Sunday 7th April 2024

We started the week with a lovely Bank Holiday, thank you Easter, and while the sun had stopped shining, I had no plans except to get back into the garden.

We’d borrowed a rotovator from a neighbour annd after skimming the surface the day before it was time to get a little deeper. I feel I should clarify that when you live on an island with a population of around 400, everyone’s a neighbour.

Next up was to set to work on exploring our proposed pond site. We have a patch that seemed to retain water and I decided to dig a little and see what was what.

As I started to dig down and move the earth I could see a large puddle of water start to form. My spade hit what I thought was concrete and perhaps the remnants of an old store house or shed, but on closer inspection I discovered it was just a giant slab. Thankfully we have a random assortment of stuff in the outhouses and I crowbarred it out.

Then we saw the real problem.

The water wasn’t a natural pool.

No it was the mains water to the house and I’d been digging right by a connector between two pipes. Turns out I’d aggravated what had been a teeny tiny trickle and now we had a minor leak. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Thankfully I’d only knocked the pipe a touch and whilst we could clearly see the water level rising, we knew it wasn’t going to start gushing down the garden into the house at any point soon. Phew!

After a visit from Scottish Water (a neighbour) the following day, we were told where our mains stopcock is (top of the road) along with the fact that everything between said stopcock and home is our responsibility - only a third of a mile or so.

Let’s hope this is the only problem we have.

Erik being Erik, he headed to the local shop, picked up a new connector and fixed the issue. Safe to say a week later and the only reason we have water pooling in the garden is because of this damn rain.

As if that wasn’t exciting enough for one week, the other thing that came under the banner of epic event, was the delivery of a couple of rugs and new Futon cover.

We bought a 2 seater Futon as a pull out bed for visitors many years ago, although it invariably tended to be us on it as we gave guests our double. It’s spent most of it’s life in a spare room just hanging about but when we moved up here I was suddenly very thankful we’d never got rid of it.

You see our brilliantly comfy 3-seater sofa wouldn’t fit through our front door and all our windows are too tiny for anything bigger than a kettle. So while the comfy cosy sofa lives in the only outbuilding that has a dry floor, our current sofa is the Futon. We’ve become accustomed to it, but I do long to stretch out on a proper sofa some days.

To ease my frustration of a tired looking Futon and a brown patterned carpet, after 18 months, I finally decided to upgrade the two. So we have a new blue cover on the sofa and a mushroom-ish coloured rug which covers most of our, what can only be described as extra, carpet.

Finally, the glasses continue to come out of the dishwasher covered in grit which makes me think that I need to clean the filter or fill up the salt. Perhaps it’s both. Given the current pace of things, I anticipate that being a problem for another few weeks yet!

Till next time, H x