The British do struggling

As a break from yoga, Shiva Nata and meditation, let’s talk about the lack of water around here. Tonight will be the third night without water in this building.

Now, I live in a gorgeous apartment, but the faults are reminding me increasingly that it’s coming up to time to move on. After all, just because I have a lovely apartment doesn’t mean I’m going to stay in Manchester forever.

I went downstairs with the trash earlier and had an explore in the basement. The building, being very old, is full of strange nooks and crannies, locked doors and odd corners where ancient bits of furniture and paper have been abandoned.

According to one of my neighbours, the pump room had to be broken into to find out whether somehow the electricity had been turned off. Because wisely, there’s only one key and the guy who has it isn’t in.

I peered in through the broken door and found a room flooded with water, and all the pumps set to “off”.

Weird. Because I have water in my kitchen sink and downstairs bathroom sink, but nowhere else. I poked about a bit but decided that I didn’t want to make things worse, so I left everything alone.

As I was leaving the basement, I met a guy on his way to his car. He stopped me and said, “Um, you don’t know what the matter is with the water, do you?”

“Oh,” I replied, and related the story about the pumps having broken, possibly, or it being the water company having fucked up in some egregious manner.

“Well, I hope they fix it,” he remarked vaguely. “It is a bit of a nuisance.”

Which is how we do things in Britain. No water for three days, having to either find toilets elsewhere every time you want to go or put the paper somewhere else, no means of washing anything including your teeth, and general discomfort on a western scale, and it’s a bit of a nuisance.

Nuclear war, and we tut tut and say, “Well, I hope they don’t stop the cricket.”

Which is why there was a big fuss about the cricket team pulling out when the Mumbai attacks happened. Because only rain stops play. Not gunmen swarming through the streets, planes flying into buildings. No, just rain.

It’s getting very entertaining here. After this morning’s pneumatic drilling, they’re just driving a mini-digger up the road. And now I’m going to have to stop because it’s just nonsense to sit here live-blogging a bunch of guys in hard hats trying to find out what’s happened to our water.