44 days, 16

Work update, since it's finally Friday. Cheeta made a wooden structure for the bathtub and a bathroom cabinet for the sink.

We redid the plastering, me by starting and making a mess, he by taking over and doing a sterling job. We put plasterboard in the gallery and were, for half a day, like kids with a new toy, cut and snap, cut and snap. Sure it makes us sound like the offspring of the worst sadist in Criminal Minds, but do you have any idea how easy it is to cut the stuff? A huge pleasure, after the Fermacell. We chose tiles with Kiwi and Cheeta. We were doing the choosing, Kira was doing the rejecting.

Hours passed thus engaged and in the final minutes she chose the first tiles we'd shown her. And lots of other small stuff that – while painful and annoying at the time, has completely vanished from memory.

But something scary DID happen today, and I suspect it'll be harder to erase it from the obsessive loop it's already traced on my brain: the water stopped. I turned the tap and NADA. I ran to the shower: NADA. Camp kitchen: NADA. Main house tap: still there, but only a trickle! Nikita checked the connection, all fine so the sole conclusion left to us: there was no pressure to push the water to the higher taps.

Finally, we are forced to join the dots. No rain since December. In the news, the Drought among headlines (but you never think it might refer to Your Place!) - now they say that over half the country is in 'extreme drought conditions'. The rest of the country (I think that's us, since I can still see green grass in the garden) is in 'severe drought'. The amount of water in the soil – water that can feed the plants – is less than 50% of what's normally there. Could all that have anything to do with the water in our taps?

It makes me think of all the talk about climate change, what's going to happen, what we'll have to live with, what we'll have to live without. It's been in our everyday conversations, on our screens, in our reading lists, in newspapers, on the radio. Why then, when it starts happening, do we not recognise it? Why, once we've recognised it, do we act so SHOCKED? Because I am shocked: I loved every day of sunshine since December, I heard all about the drought, there's practically no other topic of discussion with neighbours, builders, postman and checkout girl at supermarket, and still I'm shocked that there's no water in the taps.

..... a day later:

Ehm, P.S. - water in the taps! Nikita discovers someone had turned our water off – from the control panel at the front gate. They had also left a small boiled sweet on the panel: a joke? A reminder to pay the water bill ? (we received no bill...) And, if so, was the sweetie there to... sweeten the pill? Anyway. The drought is still here. I bought buckets. I resolved to fix the upper tank. And next time the water stops we will check the tap at the front gate.