I’ve found out how much we take water for granted. Yes, the hard way...

WATER, water everywhere… but as I write this, we have been without a drop in our taps for 20 hours. I know, I know. It’s a First World Problem, and there are people in this country who frequently have to endure prolonged water outages, but right now, it still feels like more than a massive inconvenience.

My youngest daughter started her transition year work experience in RTÉ this morning. First day, first time meeting a new group of students, first impressions… and she had just enough water to brush her teeth. Like her mother before her, she is a martyr to greasy hair, which needs to be washed daily if she wants to avoid resembling a dirty mop. Oh dear.

My son has just left for college. He is an 18-year-old male. That’s really all you need to know about how necessary a daily shower is for him.

In other words, there are five fully grown people in my household and right now, we’re all pretty manky.

I won’t even mention the toilets, apart from pointing out that three of those five grown-ups are female. Even basic hand-washing is out in those littlest rooms with the biggest problems. We have hand sanitisers in both bathrooms, but honestly, it just doesn’t feel clean.

But it’s not the hand-washing or even the showers that have us all constantly turning on the tap before remembering there’s nothing in it.

The dog’s water bowl. It’s kind of hard to explain to a mutt about inadequate water supplies, faulty pipes and the fact that we live in an elevated position, so even when everyone else in our estate has had their service restored, we are still literally high and dry. Five people, that’s a hell of a lot of tea and coffee. And each time we are reminded that we are rationing a single large saucepan of water that we filled over the weekend.

We actually filled two; the second one is long gone. And just now, I tried to refill a vase of wilting tulips.

The other things you take for granted: the dishwasher and the washing machine are both full, ready to run. When we realised the water supply hadn’t returned overnight, I sighed and announced that now I’d have to wash the dishes by hand.

You know there’s no water, but you honestly forget just how vital clean running water is to every aspect of life. It’s little wonder that long before the Romans thought of roads, they got the water supply right. And all the time, I’m looking out into a garden that still has plenty of snow in it. On the shady side of our patio, it’s about a foot deep. We could boil it, I suppose, but then what would we do with all that slightly muddy hot water?

This is not an anti-Irish Water rant or a revisiting of the water charges debate, but it does seem absurd that in a country famed the world over for its generous amounts of rain, we have water shortages at all.

IT seems even odder that at the very time the entire country is dripping with industrial quantities of melting snow, the levels in our reservoirs should be so low. It also serves as a personal wake-up call about all those news reports that crop up right across the calendar about whole areas on boil notices or without any water supply at all.

Whenever I hear those reports, I think of people unable to shower. I rarely consider their dogs or even their vases, but these are the little essentials that keep the world turning. And there’s nothing like a day without it, to make you appreciate just how important a clean, reliable water supply actually is.

That said, I’m very much looking forward to taking it for granted again.

In the meantime, to echo The Police, Don’t Stand So Close To Me.