The Scottish Water employee

Season 1, Episode 4 - May 2024

There are times in life where you might encounter a problem or two. There are professions, say, organic blueberry farming, for example, where problems seem to come around with extraordinary frequency. I will admit that there was a part of the story that I left out of the previous episode. Cast your mind back to April: while Charlie did the hard work shovelling digestate onto the base of each bush, I headed off to get some of my very expensive wood chip to mulch with; the final part of the weed prevention process. Sitting atop the Viking ride-on ‘tractor’ mower, cutting deck removed for extra speed, one small trailer load of wood chip bouncing along behind me, I headed up the strip between rows 4 and 5 at pace. About 30 yards in, now travelling at my top speed of 4mph, I was forced to break hard and retreat. A large area of normally well drained ground was sitting in several inches of water.

A natural problem solver, I found a path around the water obstacle and carried on with the task at hand. At the end of the week and with my day job calling, I resigned myself to the fact that until I returned, I couldn’t do much except hope the water would just go away on its own.

Narrator: “the water did not go away on its own.”

Image 1: The blueberry swamp

Having promised my girlfriend a weekend of unwinding in the countryside, with just a little bit of farming on the side, in May I returned home to find that where I once farmed blueberries, I now had a pretty impressive swamp. On Saturday morning I splashed up and down the rows and concluded that the area now under water must be something in the region of 400 square metres. There was no denying it, getting rid of the new water feature was going to be the focus of the weekend. I needed to get as much of the water away from the bushes as quickly as possible, so I did what any rational person would do; I enlisted my loving (and clearly misguided) girlfriend in some hard labour. Specifically, digging a channel so that the water would ** go away **.

Images 2, 3: Misguided girlfriend, water channel (in that order)

In a surprising turn of events, she did such a good job of this that she was spotted by Scottish Water and hired on the spot! Wild. As management, I oversaw the digging of the water channel for a short while, then left when it became clear that all was under control. I cleaned the one drain I’d located in January (recall the episode aptly named Drains, Glorious Drains) then panic texted Alec (not his real name) - a man who’d spent the last quarter of a century fine tuning the farm drains with my late dad - and asked for immediate access to his drainpipe database. Thankfully, he obliged.

Image 4: Easterton Farm drain pipe database, p19

Armed with this new information, on Sunday, my younger brother and I spent the day rodding every drainpipe we could find on the south side of the field but to no avail. As the evening approached, my neighbour came down to the field to see what was going on, and having assessed the situation, told me grimly that while the cause of the problem could be a blocked drain, or an issue with the water table, it could also be that - when putting in new fence posts - we had hit the main water pipe for the town of Elgin (which I now understand runs somewhere underneath the field). I left the field in the dark, furious that not only was it probably my own doing that the blueberry bushes were drowning, but that I’d also potentially damaged the water infrastructure for a town of thirty-thousand.

Image 5: No caption required

Ten days passed before I could next get back to the farm. I returned to the scene of the crime to find that two ducks had decided to call my blueberry swamp ‘home’ - great. I’d started the year farming blueberries and was more likely to end it farming ducks. Astonishingly, the water channel was still running at full flow, so I left positive feedback with my local Scottish Water representative.

A man on a mission, I marched to the opposite end of the field, this time scouring the bank of the stream on the North side of the field for drainpipes to investigate. The first three drainpipes that I found yielded little. The fourth drainpipe was large, but from the angle it was set at and its positioning relative to the other pipes, I decided it was the short section of old pipe, nothing more. About 30 metres into the drain, my rods hit something solid that sounded and felt to me like the end of a pipe. I was just starting to take the rods out when I heard a gurgle and some debris flowed out of the pipe into the stream. Trembling with excitement, I got the rods back in the drainpipe, hit the lump of solid material and gave it a proper shove. More gurgling! Then more sludge! A moment later my drain rods started reversing themselves out of the drain. Suddenly drain rods were firing backwards out of the drain faster than I could direct them. Then a large (empty, but for water) compost bag belched out of the pipe and a torrent of water followed; it was like the Niagara Falls, but a small drain pipe at Easterton. Drain rods lay everywhere, scattered as though I’d made an attempt at modern art. It was chaos. I was grinning like a maniac. You’d think I’d just seen the face of my first child, but I doubt that day will come close to this.

Within 24 hours, the water level across the field was down several inches. In 48 hours, it was gone and the water channel was dry. Praise be.

Let’s imagine that in the days leading up to the magical appearance of water there had been quite a lot of rain. Maybe one’s younger brother had mentioned that he’d seen a bag in the ditch that drains directly under the blueberry field. Maybe he’d mentioned it would be wise to get it out quickly before it went down a drainpipe. Maybe he hadn’t. If I’d decided not to get said bag out of the ditch at the time because I was tired, only to find that the bag was nowhere to be seen the following morning. If those events had all happened like that then that would probably make me a bit stupid, wouldn’t it? Ah well. Lucky that didn’t happen then!

Until next time.