Oh Well

When I tell people that we get our water from a well I'm sure that a romantic notion of Jaki wearing a dirndl dress and two wooden pales suspended from a shoulder yoke and splashing her way across the agricultural terraces from somewhere like this crosses people's minds.

In fact, if we'd been here before 1973, when electricity finally arrived in San Jose, we would have been winding buckets up by hand. Nowadays, modern Ibiza is more functional and slightly less romantic.

This is the well which supplies our water. It's pumped up the terraces and stored at the top in a giant tank from whence it flows under gravity's insatiable influence to the houses in our street.

The countryside around the village is criss-crossed by flimsy black tubing delivering vital supplies of water to our dwellings. It doesn't take much to cut the supply and we ourselves were ploughed back to the stone ages after a tractor incident involving this very pipe.

We also have a large storage tank of water in the house - it's about the size of a child's bedroom and is two metres deep with water. It acts like a giant toilet cistern, as the water level drops with use, a floating ball cock opens a valve and allows more water in.

In August the ball cock broke with the valve open and we found ourselves with gallons of water gushing from the overflow pipe and onto the patio. The only way to stop wasting water was to cut the supply to the whole street (at the main storage tank) because Pep, the owner of the well was away on a trip.

Anyway, we got it fixed and some days later I asked Pep where he'd been. The answer was Expo Zaragoza 2008 to learn about conservation of water and sustainable development! Oh well.