Water, water everywhere, but…
Ajourney of discovery recently, when my cleaner pointed out that for my ENTIRE life I have been putting the fabric conditioner in the wrong compartment in my washing machine drawer!
No wonder my towels have always been like sandpaper.
And there was me blaming Wessex Water.
It all came out in the wash, when, my having got it right at last, the landlady of my local, squeezing past me in the crowded bar, felt obliged to comment on how soft my shirt was.
We live in a hard water area. Witness my Scottish friend staring in horror into my furred-up kettle exclaiming, ‘What the Leith is that?’ Mind, I had a similar reaction when brown peat water spewed from the tap in my Edinburgh hotel room. Goes well with a single malt, I’m told.
Cue international kettle story. When my Natural Theatre Company team was appearing on the streets of the Turkmenistan capital, Ashgabat, we were based in the city’s opera house.
As the country’s totalitarian dictator had recently banned opera, along with circus performances and beards, the staff didn’t have a lot to do.
Indeed, the foyer had been converted into a souvenir shop, despite tourists being as rare as hen’s teeth.
We were hosted by a young man whose job was normally to administer the music library.
Every sweltering afternoon, in a room lined from floor to ceiling with ancient dog-eared leatherbound files bulging with yellowing sheet music, he made us a pot of tea.
That is, until I spotted him filling the kettle from a rancid pond in the theatre’s yard!
The fact was, behind the building’s auditorium with its glorious renditions of folk art, the place was in a state.
Our dressing room was lit by one lightbulb and the taps didn’t work.
Flushing the loo using a stick with a filthy rag tied round the end while the mellifluous sound of someone rehearsing the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute filtered down from the floor above, was a bizarre experience.
An unseen diva obviously hoping for a reversal of His Nibs’ current arts policy!
The inevitable result of drinking pond water meant we became all too familiar with the ‘facilities.’
Ashgabat was suffering from terrible water problems, mostly related to the ill-conceived Karakum canal, the 854-mile irrigation channel that was a major contributor to the draining of Central Asia’s biggest lake, the Aral Sea.
You will have seen the famous pictures of skeletal hulks rusting in the desert. Well, at the other end, the water table had risen, causing underpasses and cellars to be flooded.
At one point, we became aware of a weird booming noise from below and, looking over the bannisters into the theatre’s darkened basement storage area, we saw an enormous throne, left over from some long-forgotten production of Aida perhaps, bobbing around in the floodwaters and emitting the hollow sounds as it repeatedly bashed against the wall.
Update: My towels are still coming out like sandpaper.
Ralph Oswick was artistic director of Natural Theatre for 45 years and is now an active patron of Bath Comedy Festival