Before we turn on the tap: replenishing our water supply

We were really hoping that it was going to rain around now. Last year when we came here on holiday, we got drenched in September. But, as yet, there has been nothing more than a short shower since June.

Our water is supplied from a cisterna under the house. This is filled up by the rain running off the roof, or by Juan the water man (which costs 90 euros per delivery, or 45 euros if we share the delivery with next door).

As the cisterna was nearly empty and we didn't want to spend lots of money, we decided to get our water from another source. In the village there is a well for the farmers. As we live in the countryside, we have bought a swipe card to gain access to this supply too.

So we took our 1,000-litre plastic water cube on a trailer down to the village, swiped our card at the well and filled up. We hadn't used the cube or the trailer before, so we weren't quite sure if everything was going to survive such a heavy load. But we checked the trailer tyre pressures, made sure everything was secured as best we could and drove slowly back up the hill to the house.

Filling up the water

Everything was going very well indeed until we turned off the tarmac road and up the hill on to the track to our house. We hit a massive bump which dislodged the cube so it slid back on the trailer, burst out of the trailer's back gate and hit the ground, wedging the corner of the trailer into the ground and leaving the cube at 45 degrees, half in and half out of the trailer. We tried to drag the trailer and the cube (which was still half-tied to the trailer) forward with the car, but one of the car's back wheels just spun round and round on bare rock. It looked as though we were going to have to open the tap, let all that precious water run down the road and start again

But our Nissan 4x4 (which until now, I've thoroughly disliked for its bigness, its redness and its unwieldiness) didn't let us down. We tried again and again with the four-wheel drive engaged, changing the angle of the wheels until at last that back tyre found some traction and we could edge forward. The trailer righted itself and - with the cube still hanging out of the back - we crept towards the house.

After that, things were easy. We attached a hose to the cube and ran it down to the entrance to the cisterna. Because the inside of the cube was dirty we held a tea towel over the end of the hose to filter the water. After five minutes or so our cube was empty and our cisterna was a bit fuller than it was before.

And most of you, dear readers, just turn on the tap...

PS - seeing that water is a finite resource really makes us think hard about how we use our water. (See this blog post too.) According to BBC Panorama, the average person in the UK uses 150 litres of water a day.

I think we're using at most about 1,000 litres a week between us, which is an average of 70 litres a day per person - which is still a lot of water when you see it in front of you.

Where does it go? Our washing machine is extremely thirsty - it needs about 90 litres for a wash and we do about two washes a week. I also hand-wash some things using the run-off from the washing machine followed by clean water for rinsing. So I guess this accounts for about 400 litres a week.

That means that we each use about 43 litres a day for washing ourselves, washing the dishes, flushing the toilet and watering a few plants - gosh.