Have I cursed myself by drinking holy water?

The mountain spring that feeds our house froze during the first ground frost, and we had no water.

The builder boyfriend filled a bucket from the fountain in the garden so we could flush the loo. This really is living in faded grandeur.

I spent the evening worrying about how we had cursed ourselves by drinking and bathing in holy water

We are waiting on various tradesmen to turn up and do things to the plumbing in our run-down Georgian pile. We know we might have to drop a bore hole. But until then the water coming out of our taps is from a ‘holy well’.

The stream pools into a grotto on the lane, a shrine with rocks around it that occasionally attracts a pilgrim who comes with a bottle and fills it from the waters.

Some of these grottos dotted around Cork and Kerry have statues of Mary, but this one doesn’t. We do have a statue of Mary the builder boyfriend rescued from a skip in south London. She was in our garden in Surrey until we moved and is resting in his builders’ yard because we had to leave all the garden ornaments behind when the removal lorry was full.

We intend to bring Mary here as soon as we can, to put her in the grotto where homage is paid to this spring water, because when we looked it up, we found some astonishing information.

This water is legally ours to use, by the way. We have it in the deeds of the house, a historic right to draw water from the source on the land above us, which is owned by a neighbouring farmer who, happily enough, is very much our sort of person and has quickly become one of our best friends.