This old tin miner’s cottage that I’m now living in is normally uninhabited in winter. The remoteness, incessant foul weather, guaranteed frozen pipes and impassable roads make the place unattractive for short-term tenants. ‘See how you get on,’ said the owner dubiously, when I offered to pay up front. ‘It might not be easy. You might hate it.’ I didn’t tell her that a little hardship, a little masochism, some exposure to the elements, is exactly what I am looking for.
There is no running water at present. The pipe taking water from the stream and delivering it to the inside taps is still frozen, so I’m collecting my cooking and washing water in a feed bucket and a white china teapot. The water, when you see it in the teapot, is brown. It is a suspiciously metallic shade of brown, consistent with mineral rather than vegetable-based sediment, and this is probably why I have been doing the military two-step on and off ever since I came here.
The sleeping arrangements are as follows. I share the bedroom with some kind of voracious blood-sucking flying insect that is resting quietly somewhere behind the plaster for the winter, conserving its energies. Roused by the heat and light from my bedside candle, however, and capable of almost supernatural stealth, this chap comes out and feasts on me nightly, leaving raised wealds in unexpected, and, one would have thought, inaccessible places.
I’ve been here a fortnight. It has rained continuously. If the downpour slackens, as it does now and then, it is only gathering its strength for throwing it down with a far greater intensity a minute or two later. Accompanying the rain is either a gale or thick fog.
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