We always switch the water off when we go away, so knew it wasn't the cold water. We figured it was the drainage from the sink, so avoided using the sink.
It wasn't until yesterday that I felt sufficiently over COVID-19 to be able to investigate. It turned out it wasn't the sink: it was the hot water pipe to the bath. We were getting one drip every three seconds.
OK, so there's an easy fix for that while we wait for a plumber: turn off the valve. A quarter turn with a screwdriver ought to do it.
OK, so we already knew that the person who installed the plumbing for the bath was bad, but the whole point of a junction with a valve in it is that you can turn the screw and cut off the water. Why, then, would you position the screw pointing away from where the user is going to be and 8cm away from a wooden joist? I spent two hours trying to turn that valve yesterday morning and couldn't do it.
After my attempts, the drips were coming at one a second. I don't know if this was my doing — I think perhaps I could have shaken free some helpful limescale or something — but after lunch I went out and bought some quick-fix epoxy putty. This stuff never seems to work, but at least it slowed the dripping down a bit.
Before I went to bed, I rigged up a chute to direct the drips into a bowl.
This worked fine. I emptied it at 2am and 5am.
Unfortunately, over the course of several hours, the water managed to push through the epoxy and direct some of the drips away from the chute. They went into a beaker we'd put underneath "just in case". This filled up, overflowed, and meant we were greeted with a damp carpet in the lounge when we got up this morning.
Our regular plumber won't even pick up his messages until tomorrow. This is why I've just posted on the village Facebook page the message "Who's the village go-to person for fixing a leaking bathroom pipe first thing on a Sunday morning?".
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It's just one thing after another.