For about the thirtieth time, the cows knocked the hose off their water trough.

I woke up, knowing something was wrong. Through the blur I could hear the house pump churning. It normally runs for 20-30 seconds then cuts out, pressure restored. By my count it was more than 60 seconds and I hauled myself out of bed.

Outside I could hear water gushing, and it didn't take me long to source it….the hose to the water trough had been pulled off again, and water was rapidly flooding the trough area.

We have a steer who likes playing with water, and I suspect its him that's been doing this. He drinks from the water jet if I am hand filling a trough with a hose, and he's partial to a squirt on a hot day.

The cows trough has always been problematic. When we moved in the trough had, over time, settled on an odd angle, and the delicate balance between high tide and float valve was off kilter, meaning if the cows didn't have a drink for a day it overflowed.

Last year I pulled it all out, put in concrete sleeper footings and balanced it. I replumbed the hoses, but it wasn't a good job. The original fittings were some sort of industrial tap…bigger than a normal tap, and permanently sealed to the agricultural lead-in pipe. I had a hard job finding hose connectors that fitted, and sealed. The hose connection was just a basic garden hose coupling, and the fitting was a very old brass one that I couldn't replace, so I stuck with it.

In the end I replaced the tap washers and screwed it all back together as tight as I could. There was a remnant tiny, tiny drip that ran permanently, keeping the whole area damp, but it was better than it had been and I had other things to do.

But recently the steer has taken to somehow pulling the hose off. Whether he's biting it, or somehow standing on it, the event is pretty spectacular from his point of view. A boring day suddenly becomes fun, with a gushing jet of water to play with.

So today I replaced the whole thing. Cut the old fitting off, replaced it with a new gate-valve tap, and better agricultural pipe fittings. Of course, it required kneeling in 5 cm of mud, compliments of the 2000 litres dumped there. And being a cow trough, it wasn't just mud I was kneeling in.

A beautiful old Kalamata olive tree shades the trough. We don't see much fruit on it, and because of the trough it doesn't get a commercial picker near it, so I haven't bothered pruning it much. Which is why some of the branches are quite low.

And every time I work on the trough, on the way out for the last time I straighten up and bean myself on a low-hanging tree branch.

And as a final insult, I can see that the new fittings are dripping, ever so slightly…..