The move to Tuscany : Cold and a cold, and no water

The general theme of this week has been cold, and a cold, and just to add a little more misery, a 30-hour period with no water coming into the house (but this time not because of the cold)! Nevertheless, we have ended the week on a high, water supply restored, and our own productivity somewhat restored.

With Stuart still suffering from the cold that started at Christmas as well as extreme tiredness, and days that started with sub-zero temperatures and struggled to get much above 7C at their mildest, neither of us felt inclined to venture outdoors for anything more long-winded than a brisk dog walk around the woods or a dash to the woodpile to grab another crate of wood to feed the fires.

Our efforts this week were therefore concentrated on indoor office work, as well as Stuart moving the wardrobe project forward by a huge step – with the inside of the wardrobe walls plastered and painted, our clothes are now happily housed in the spacious closet, and the flimsy hand-me-down chip board monstrosities that we inherited have been dismantled and removed from the bedroom. All that remains now is for the outside of the wardrobe to be plastered and painted – jobs that had to be put on hold at the end of the week due to the by then very wet and windy weather making it impossible (or undesirable) to mix plaster outside.

Practically a walk-in wardrobe.

After a run of very cold, bright, dry days, Friday was wet, windy and generally pretty foul weather-wise. The forecast had suggested it would warm up to 11C, but it certainly didn’t feel that mild, and indeed when we drove into town to do our supermarket shopping at lunchtime, the temperature displayed outside the factory on the way into town declared it to be just 4C. By the time we had run around Esselunga and begun making our way back out of town up the valley, the hills of the valley had turned a dusty white colour – indeed, our friends David & Sarah reported snow falling in Vellano. For us on our hill it remained cold, cold rain and we hunkered down in front of the fire.

Shortly after lunch, I headed to the office to continue some office work while Stuart busied himself with washing some pans. Or at least he tried. When, from my desk, I heard ‘Oh.’ from the direction of the kitchen, I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. As has happened far too many times before, Stuart had turned on the tap to be rewarded with a sweet fat nothing for his efforts. Now, despite the inclement weather, it certainly wasn’t below freezing at this point on Friday, so the loss of water couldn’t be attributed to frozen pipes this time.

When we drove past on our way back from the supermarket, we were somewhat relieved to see a couple of guys in high-vis gear and their Acque (the water company) van rooting around the area where our water meter is located. We assumed that our loss of water was either due to them having turned it off while they did something, or else they were there at our meter trying to fix a problem that they had been alerted to. We felt somewhat relieved. That is until darkness fell and we still had no water. By this point the workers would surely have gone home and had left us without any water. In fact we had some water pressure according to the pressure gauge that Stuart had fitted close to the house last year, just not enough pressure for the water to reach the house.

Funnily enough (we weren’t laughing), it was almost exactly a year ago that exactly the same thing had happened.

We were somewhat heartened to find a notice from the water company shared by the mayor of Pescia on Facebook, that stated that due to unforeseen problems with the water supply in the area, properties in Calamari would be experiencing interruptions to their water supply on Friday afternoon. While we are not in Calamari, it is a small community very close to us, just down the road, so it was reasonable to assume that we were part of the same set of works. Somewhat less encouragingly, the notice stated that the repair works would be completed by 6pm on Friday evening. Come 8pm on Friday evening our taps were still dry as a bone.

When you have no water you really really appreciate the value and the privilege of having an uninterrupted supply of freely flowing water. The obvious obstacles you face when your water disappears like this are that you can’t wash/shower, you can’t wash your hands after using the toilet and indeed you can’t flush the toilet (thankfully we still had the large 25 litre container of water we’d filled up last week at Amanda’s shop so were able to “flush” the toilet, of a fashion, and wash our hands in cold water at least). You then realise that making a cup of tea or coffee depends on you having some bottled water available (thankfully we had two bottles of still water left – we didn’t have to resort to boiling fizzy water for hot drinks), as does brushing your teeth, and cooking options start to become limited. Should we have pasta for dinner? Well, without enough clean water to boil the pasta in, that wasn’t going to be an option. Likewise for anything rice-based. Besides which, the idea of the washing up piling up even more than it was already was pretty unappealing. In the end we opted for take-out pizza from our local restaurant Nerone. The second time in three days – admittedly not a hardship, but certainly an unplanned expense and not really what we’d had in mind for dinner.

By Saturday morning, there was still no water and overnight the temperature had tumbled and everything the rain had touched was frozen hard – if we’d had any water in our pipes it might well have been frozen. Even the car doors were frozen closed, and the ground was hard and frosty. We hoped that the work on the water supply had merely been put on hold overnight and would be recommencing in the morning, although scouring the water company’s online notice pages didn’t turn up anything to suggest that customers in our area might still be experiencing outages.

After a very chilly walk around our woods with Reggie, we ventured out as far as Amanda’s shop in the village to collect our weekly bread order as well as our homework and something for lunch that wouldn’t require us to use water or wash up!

We told Samantha our sorry tale about our lack of water. It was last Saturday that we had a day without water due to frozen pipes – it feels as if it’s becoming a weekly habit! Samantha very kindly offered to ask Mario, her partner, who works for the water company, whether he knew of any ongoing issues with the water after she got home. We thanked her and made our way back up the hill.

While at Amanda’s shop we also ran into our friend Paul, who was waiting outside the post office where Kathy was paying their water bill (ironically enough). They very generously offered us the opportunity to go to their house that evening for hot showers and dinner as well – an offer we couldn’t refuse!

With the promise of showers that evening, we felt more inclined to throw ourselves into an afternoon’s work on the terraces, safe in the knowledge that even if we had no water ourselves, we would be able to get ourselves clean at the end of the day. We therefore spent the afternoon on the lower terraces clearing up all the piles of wood and branches from the hazel trees that Stuart had cut down some weeks before Christmas.

Samantha telephoned in the early afternoon to let us know that Acque were indeed still working on a problem with the water supply in the area and that they were giving out free water to people in the piazza in Calamari. While, from what she said, it sounded doubtful as to whether we would get our water back that day (they couldn’t say for sure and said that everyone would get theirs back at different times), it was a relief to know that there was an ongoing problem that was known about and being worked on – at least we felt a little less as if we’d just been abandoned and forgotten about!

By the time we’d put in a few hours of work on the terraces, the taps were still dry, so come 6pm we packed our towels and clean clothes, gathered up a surprised-looking Reggie from the sofa (who had just finished his dinner and was about to settle down for a power nap), and headed off in the car towards Castelvecchio.

Once at Paul & Kathy’s we availed ourselves of their facilities, enjoying lovely hot showers, then spent a great evening with our friends, eating a delicious Thai curry and chatting and laughing the night away. Reggie becomes calmer and seems more at home every time we visit Paul & Kathy’s house, and while he still spent a considerable part of the evening going outside to bark at the local wildlife (which is what he would do at home anyway), he spent most of the evening chilling out next to the dinner table and even picking out logs of firewood from the basket to chew.

We said our goodbyes at around 11pm and headed cautiously down the very sparkly frosty roads towards home. On arriving home, without hope or expectation, I turned the kitchen tap – only to find water spurting out! Having not had any water when we left the house, in the dark, at 6pm, we had no expectation of the water having come back over the hours that we had been away from the house, so were surprised and thrilled at the discovery!

We slept a sounder sleep knowing we had our most precious of resources restored and in the morning it felt like true luxury to get up, run the water to brush our teeth and flush the toilet. I even went as far as doing the washing up before breakfast, such was the joy of having running water.

With our water supply restored, Sunday felt a whole lot more relaxed – gone was the nagging worry that there was a bigger problem than we realised or that we had been forgotten about by the water company. In celebration, we spent the day working outdoors – chipping the branches of hazel we’d brought up the hill from the lower terraces and moving yet more wood down from the upper terraces to the drive. A good, productive day’s work, and one that was rewarded at the end of the day with a blissful hot shower, this time in our own home.