It's simply H2O...

"Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink..."

So cries the Ancient Mariner (possibly... I never was any good at English: science is more my thing). And it's a cry that's being echoed across the wild, and currently parched, plains of Oxford after a building contractor accidently drove a crane through the mains water pipe into my building. Or something. Given this is Britain, and it's currently summertime, it could be that we have the wrong sort of water. Whatever.

For the point is, dear readers, that we have no water. None to drink, none to use in the bathrooms, and none for our experiments. Which is how I come to be writing this, as I wait for my water circulator (a device that, well, circulates water) to slowly warm up from 2 to 25 degrees centigrade. I would normally simply empty out a few litres of cold water and replace them with a similar volume of hot. Unable to do this, I could be here a while.

Which got me thinking just how much water we must use. Apparently the daily volume consumed by every single person in the UK is, on average, 160 litres: that's really rather a lot.

So I propose a solution to this problem, and the current climate-change-influenced shortages we're either currently experiencing, or which in the near future are guaranteed to turn England's green and pleasant land into something resembling the Sahara desert (although possibly without the camals). To paraphrase from that attributed to Marie Antoinette*, "Let them drink wine."

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* As mentioned, I'm not an English student and, unsurprisingly, one would be correct in assuming that, despite a decent grade at GCSE, I'm not much of a historian either. Consequently, I had to Google to discover who made this infamous comment. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find out (from the font of all knowledge that is Yahoo!) that in all likelihood, Ms. Antoinette was in fact completely innocent of this heinous crime, a far more likely culprit being French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in early 1766! The things you learn when you start wasting time...