Top Stories
- Balham Newsie Competitions: Terms & Conditions
- A busy summer sales market in Balham
- Exceptional demand for family homes in Balham
- The Balham Sales market is moving fast!
- Local resources following Sarah Everard Tragedy
- Update on the Balham Sales market from Marsh & Parsons
- What's the current shape of the Balham Lettings market?
- Free Mental Health Support in Balham and the UK
- Hearing Hospitality: Emily, Owner of Emily Preece & Co
- Hearing Hospitality: Lisa, Owner of The Exhibit Balham
- Domestic Abuse Support: links & resources from Hestia
- Hearing Hospitality: Ben, Co-Owner of Love Triangle PIzza
- Hearing Hospitality: Brook, Owner of Voodoo Balham
- Hearing Hospitality: Mubin, Owner of Indian Room, Balham
- Hearing Hospitality: Kam & Autumn at TikiTail Balham
- Hearing Hospitality: Freddie, Head Chef at Brickwood Balham
- Zipcar for Business: Keeping local non-profits on the move
- Ten Dental Balham: Promoting great oral health in children
- Zipcar for Business: Keeping Balham Box Frames on the move!
- Balham food & drink businesses offering takeaway and / or delivery
THE SOUTH LONDON THAMES WATER APOCALYPSE - A ONE WOMAN ACCOUNT
Thames Water have left thousands of people without water in South London for days – whilst scrolling through Facebook earlier today we came across Pauline Brown’s candid and well-written account which she was happy for us to share with you.
‘There was a guy sitting in front of me on the bus this morning as I made my way down Brixton Hill on the way to work. He was clearly agitated, bouncing gently up and down on the seat, his arm leaning vertically on the pillar at the front left hand corner of the bus. I didn’t think much of it - agitated people are a common sight on the 250 or the 159, the 109 or the 133. In fact on any of the buses in London it's not unusual to encounter people clearly struggling with some inner conflict or other. The smell that crept over the front end of the bus over the next few moments, however, told me all I needed to know about what particular inner conflict this poor chap was dealing with. He needed a crap, and I would have happily bet my house that he was one of the tens of thousands of people in the London area who have been left without water over the past few days.
We’ve had no water since around 8pm on Saturday night so I know exactly how the young man feels. This morning, thankfully, I benefited from the stagnant contents of a neglected washing up bowl left in the garden on some unspecified day last summer, but fuck knows what I’ll do tomorrow, what any of us will do tomorrow. I'm not sure i’ll make it all the way across London to work, but getting off public transport to hunt for a toilet between here and there carries its own risks - what if wherever I pitch up looking for a loo, they don’t have water either? Watching the red patches on the Thames Water map which show households without water grow bigger and bigger as their PR machine trots out platitudes and false promises, it feels like one by one every toilet in London is shutting down.
Yesterday morning, after a scant twelve hours without water, it all felt like a bit of an adventure - the whole family hopping into the car and heading off out of the borough in search of a full English, a functional toilet and a supermarket which still had supplies of bottled water. ‘Jeez, mum, it's not the apocalypse!’ The kids laughed as I hurried them out of Wetherspoons (what can I say - the full English is a bargain) and over the road to Sainsbury's in time for the doors opening, but the countless potholes streaming water we had passed on the drive up had set up in me a sort of dystopian angst and I wasn’t to be messed with. We were lucky - the shelves had been cleared but great shrink-wrapped blocks of Evian and Highland Spring were clogging the aisles. Tearing at the plastic with their bare hands, husband and son liberated enough to keep us and a few of our neighbours going while me and daughter went to stock up on baby wipes and dry shampoo.
By the afternoon we were sorted, ish. Thames Water, for whom we still had a modicum of sympathy - it wasn't their fault that the ‘beast from the east’ had burst pipes all over London - had finally pulled their fingers out and begun delivering supplies of bottled water to a distribution point in the Homebase and Sainsbury’s car parks, where people with cars could come to collect as much as they needed. We were confident that the problem would be sorted by the following morning. Husband reported a spirit-of-the-Blitz-style fortitude among the punters at Homebase and returned with a boot full of water, a bottle of something sweet and sparkly from the grateful elderly couple over the road and a bashful expression - ‘she gave me a kiss!’
Twitter became the go to place for information as the evening wore on, if information is what you could call the lies, damn lies and disinformation that spewed from the Thames Water communications team as increasingly desperate home-owners began tweeting their concerns. It’s not the fault of the poor people manning the social media barricades, bless ‘em, but tempers were flaring and the snark was rising by the time I was signing off on Sunday night, resigning myself to starting my working week with dirty hair and a faint whiff of baby wipe. It was hard not to join in with the cynics decrying the huge dividends paid to shareholders and massive bonuses we’re always hearing about being paid to fat cats at the top of the Thames Water tree.
Today was spent in an office so far unaffected by the encroaching public health crisis, checking twitter from time to time for updates and phoning in home to where daughter dutifully tripped back and forth to the kitchen tap to see if normality had been restored while she wasn't looking. No joy. It looks like tomorrow morning’s ablutions will involve Highland Spring, despite there being something distinctly counterintuitive about pouring bottled water into a cistern when, come summer, we’ll all be implored to observe a hosepipe ban.
In between cutting and pasting pat responses to increasingly desperate punters - what if you can't get out of the house, what if you're disabled, what if you're sick, what if you don't have friends or neighbours willing to fetch supplies for you? - Thames Water have been trumpeting the fact that they are pumping ‘an extra 500 million litres of water a day into the system’. Here’s an idea - how about actually pumping it into people’s houses? I'm not sure what more anyone can do to sort out the mess - would storming the offices of Thames Water do any more good than gritting our teeth and continuing to display the patience they keep thanking us for? I doubt it. Still, tomorrow I might look into cancelling my monthly direct debit - what they going to do? Cut off my water?’
Pauline Brown is a a 51-year-old Scottish writer and editor who has lived in Streatham, on and off, since she arrived in London in 1989. She has a husband, two grown-up children (that she can't seem to shake off) and two cats. She loves South London.