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Our landscape has changed from the Inner city to Island life and we are surrounded by sea water and swimming pools and this is a pressure we are not used to coming from our North London roots. When the sun is shining the water is so inviting and you feel you couldn’t possible live without a pool and then about 10 weeks later the water is too cold to even go near it. The pool then sits in the garden needing cleaning and looking after for the remaining forty-two weeks of the year. I suppose we should be researching ways of heating it so that we can use it for longer, maybe solar panels or a plastic tent. Now that our kitchen is almost finished perhaps we can find some energy for some research into this subject. Trev has a book on pool maintenance that’s almost bigger than our pool so I hate to think what adding heating to it would do to the instruction manual. Thinking is getting to be a hard thing to do now that summer is in full swing so I think we’ll just enjoy the pool and the sea and sort out the practicalities another day.

North London is experiencing a hosepipe and sprinkler ban and Thames Water’s web site makes for interesting reading. They advise you that watering gardens and allotments is only permissible with buckets of water and not hosepipes. Cars can be washed with a bucket but you can use a hosepipe to fill the bucket. Toddlers are alright because paddling pools can be filled with a bucket filled by a hosepipe and then emptied on to the garden when you’ve finished. Then the boss of Thames Water says that if you are very good and helpful they won’t apply for a drought order and by the way the rain of the last month means that the reservoirs are full. Too little, too late because did you know that London has less rainfall than Istanbul, Rome or Dallas and it’s all a mess because we have old pipes that leak. Water everywhere but don’t go near that hosepipe unless of course you are filling a bucket…….

Our relocation to Soller has introduced us to the Water Man. He really does exist and we learnt about him in the deeds of the village house we bought. We gathered that we are entitled to three and a quarter minutes worth of water from the well every week. A well serves us and the group of houses that surround us and the water man arrives with the key every Thursday morning. It is a social gathering and the men and women that tend the market gardens next door and behind us are waiting for him to ‘let the water flow’. They push the water round the channels they have dug for the purpose around their fruit trees and vegetables and they swish it around manually until all their crops have had a good drink. Not for them a hosepipe, the sport is chasing the water round before it can settle in one spot so that every growing thing gets its fair share. Trev joins the gathering but chooses not to run after the precious water, instead allows it to fill the tank that we have in the bottom of the garden, that the previous owners built for that purpose. We accumulate the water there and every day attach the pipes and use the hosepipe and sprinkler – how very North London!!

We have local friends who have a well on their land which they believed was the purest of water and so they drank it. They used it for everything and after doing so for about a year began to be rather unwell. They sent a sample for analysis to a laboratory in Palma and the result came back very quickly. Unfit for human consumption; do not under any circumstances drink. When we arrived we were advised by our Water Man not to drink the water as it was only fit to be put back into the ground. There are springs of pure water around Soller, the one on the edge of town has cars stopping with people filling their water receptacles with it but we haven’t lived here long enough to know which ones we can and can’t drink.

Kate and Emma started swimming lessons in the beautiful municipal pool in Soller. It is set high in the town with mountains all around. It is a glorious spot and now the school holidays are here the swimming pool has organised lessons for all age groups. Kate is an excellent swimmer thanks to the early training at the Oakleigh Park Swimming School in North London and to the daily swimming opportunities living by the sea gives her. Her strokes need refining and so twice a week she is concentrating on backstroke and front crawl and working very hard. Emma is only two and she and other little ones take to the water with their arm bands and their nice teacher and they all on cue cry throughout the lesson! I am sure the teacher loves that session! All in a good cause as Lucy and all the local mums know how important a life skill swimming is, if you are going to live here.

Next week: The first day of the Sales…

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