Molly Forbes, Paradise. 

“I wouldnae ken where to start… All this attention makes me feel like a celebrity and I’m nae. I’m just an ordinary person. I live in Paradise, my home in Menie, but it’s feeling less like Paradise these days.

The day Alicia photographed me we’d had nae water for eight days. A few days afore Michael was washing the car and he suddenly had nae water. He came o’er and told me be careful wi the water. At first we thought it was the dry weather and the spring had gone weak. After a week one o’ the boys came and said to Mike ‘have you no water?’ Mike said ‘nae for a week’; they brought bottled water and said they’d get it on again. The diggers had torn up the pipe. It was three days getting it fixed and finding the broken pipe that runs into the well, it was ten days in total. Mike had to bleed it to get it into his tank, it came to mine first. It took days to get clean as it was dirty so we still had to use bottled water.

Well, yi canna live without water! I was carrying water for ma hens and plants from the burn. I had a barra, twa watering cans and a paint pot wi a string. I wheeled the barra to the burn, I stood at the burnside, dippit in the paint pot lifted it up and poured it into the watering cans for the hens and the plants and to flush the toilet because they were aye needing water. If they’d read the plans properly they should have know exactly where the spring was as it’s all on the deeds. I had bother with my stomach but may not have anything  with the water."