Egress

From around the spring above my house, water flows through the settlement tank, the first stage of my cold water supply. In this tank bits of grit and dirt sink to the floor while a few centimetres up a protected inlet pipe draws the water on to the next stage,
This is a much larger cistern. Two meters deep and about one and a half in diameter, it holds then about three and a half thousand litres of water, This almost completely underground and about fifteen metres higher up the hillside than the house. It provides a cool clean store of fine water year in and year out at a good pressure.
At the bottom of the tank a second filtered inlet carries the water on down to the house below. This passage is conducted through a plastic pipe buried about one and a half metres deep to avoid even the worst cold spell that the winter can bestow. This pipe ends just outside the wall of the kitchen at a reducing stop tap.
Here the pipe steps down from twenty two millimetre to the standard domestic copper pipe of fifteen millimetre diameter.
A metre or so on, through the wall and now in my kitchen, there is a second stop tap.
If ever the water supply hiccups, and this has happened three times so far in all the time I have lived here, it is to this stop tap that I turn my eye. It is from here that I use a simple corkscrew to extract blockage.
Now then. Reflect upon the journey that the small frog in the picture above has endured.
You will appreciate perhaps why the poor creature seems past its best.