However, despite our winter storms, significant parts of the UK are staring down the barrel of empty water butts. The UK’s average annual rainfall is about 1,100mm, compared with less than 300mm in Pakistan or double figures in Egypt. Little old England manages to encompass many global water problems – scarcity, overabstraction, pollution, underinvestment, government and regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct – all within the confines of one small country in the far west of Europe. As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable. Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. D uring the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido.
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