In my other life, I’m a water engineer

Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with our spring-fed water supply. Hearing their car, I slithered out to greet them, covered in slime like a monster from the deep. It would be natural to say this took them by surprise. It did not. They know me.

Since infancy I’ve loved playing with water. Every river I could dam, every channel I could dig, every pond I could drain or fill, every stream I could divert, every castle wall I could build against the encroaching tide, seemed to point to a promising career as a water engineer. Sadly I showed no talent for any of this; and, later, the maths bored me. I just loved digging, damming and diverting: a master of my little water world.

Maybe that’s why when I bought a house in rural Derbyshire, I fell at once for a place called Spout. Our home is by a constant spring on the side of a hill, where the work that had detained me as guests arrived was part of my decades-long project to turn our property into something that in my imagination is a minor English Alhambra. Our spring water provides our domestic supply, but so much more. One branch flows into a huge 10ft-long, tadpole-teeming granite trough, the overflow tinkling on to another trough lower down, whose overflow then joins another branch which feeds a pond, a stone fountain I bought in Colombia (this roadside impulse purchase cost more to transport than to buy), a swimming pool, a pond, and a sunken bathtub. A third branch I still haven’t got right: it’s supposed to tumble into another trough but only works in winter: I’m contemplating a booster-feed from a side spring.