Giles Brown
BE careful what you wish for. At the beginning of March, I was seriously concerned about the lack of rainfall in Spain. Specifically the lack of rainfall at the Casita as the reservoir receded rapidly.
By the middle of the month, the water level had dropped so severely that it looked like it normally does at the end of a long hot summer. It also meant that I was unable to refill the casita’s deposit tank and I promptly ran out of water. It certainly made things more, ahem, ‘challenging’, than normal as I resorted to transporting eight litres bottles of water up from the coast for washing, cleaning and ‘flushing’ purposes.
The dystopian diorama was enhanced by the 4×4, quad and motocross enthusiasts who took the opportunity to tear across the dry lake bed in true ‘Mad Max’ style. I took a perverse pleasure in watching the vain attempts of those foolish enough to try and tackle the fresh mud to free themselves. They faced an embarrassing call to the ‘grua‘ company and a long wait for the 4×4-tow truck to arrive…
I should have known better than to gloat, of course, as karma was waiting in the wings. When the rain finally arrived, it poured from the night sky with Wagnerian ferocity. Awakened by the sound at some ungodly hour of the morning, I dimly wondered why I had left a tap on.
I shot bolt upright when I released that the gushing sound was not coming from my bathroom, but a crack in the floor between my bedroom and the kitchen. Springing naked from the bed – apart from a hastily donned head torch – I scooped up the shoes, sports bag and anything else on the floor and flung it on the bed. The kitchen already had an inch of water in it, while the en-suite shower floor was bubbling merrily away.
There was only one thing for it. Being a single guy, my bedroom contains ‘The Chair’. This is a strategically placed piece of furniture on which I throw T-shirts, towels and linen that is past or approaching its ‘clean me’ date. I grabbed the mixed contents of ‘The Chair’ and rapidly improvised a basic sandbag setup. My Canute-like skills confirmed, I slunk back on the only untouched area of the bedroom, the bed itself with a sigh of relief.
It was at that point that Fifty Shades walked across the sheet, leaving perfectly formed feline muddy footprints….
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