Water water everywhere ...

and quite a bit of it seems to be in my cellar! Oh the joys of living in an old house in the country, the birds, the animals, the open fields, the flooding every winter. Ah well I guess you can't have it all and what would I moan about if I did? See that lovely reflective surface? Well, that would be the 2 inches of water covering the cellar floor as the pump had "forgotten" to switch itself back on. It normally switches itself on and off automatically and copes quite well but an hour with no pump produces this and it seems to be happening all too regularly at the moment. Cue me running around in mad panic, in my wellies if I remember first, stuffing my hand into the icy water of the sump to fiddle about with the pump. If I'm lucky, it's just an air lock and not a stone and it starts up again. Otherwise it's a screwdriver job and as I'm the one generally at home during the day, I just have to get on with it. Good job I'm a liberated, self sufficient, independant woman. Haha.

I think the pump's trying to tell us it's overworked. You wouldn't believe from the amount of water standing in the fields here that I actually live five miles from the driest place in England! I don't think we'd worry about it so much if the boiler for the central heating wasn't down there. For some reason water and oil don't seem to mix?! No central heating? In winter? Hmm, I think we'd best keep pumping!