'Water was coming in through the roof, the windows and the stone walls. It caused mushrooms to grow in the bedrooms, and sizeable bits of the ceiling to detach themselves without notice'

Water, water everywhere for Jonathan Self — especially in the places where you'd least want to have it. Water is everywhere in the solar system. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Mars, Jupiter and their moons were formed from a solar nebula that contained water.

The world holds roughly 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometres of the stuff. It’s what regulates the earth’s temperature and your own temperature, too, human bodies being mostly water, of course. ‘Nothing,’ according to Lao Tzu, ‘is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.

’ Our house certainly couldn’t. Before we took the decision to renovate, water was coming in through the roof, the windows and the stone walls. It caused mushrooms to grow in several of the bedrooms (non-edible, sadly, or we’d have sold them in the farm shop) and was why sizeable bits of the drawing-room ceiling were inclined to detach themselves without notice and with near-fatal results (‘One lump or two, Vicar?’).

It is not an especially big house — about the size of a country rectory — but, for various reasons far too tedious to enumerate here, it has taken a very long time to put right. Eight years, in fact. Oh, I am not complaining.

Far from it. We have been able to rent on and off in the neighbourhood and we are fortunate enough to have a house in the city. Still, I will admit that, since we were forced to move out, I have frequently felt fed up with our situation, especially in the middle of the night.

Wendell B.