So I didn't regale you with water stories

Because of the vagaries of the US immigration I never got to sit next to Christine on the plane. She’s a British subject and not a British Citizen (having been born in Ireland but lived in the UK for nearly 60 years) and needed a visa to enter America. Unfortunately we only found out that she wasn’t a British citizen when we were checking in, and, to cut a long and sad story short she stayed at home! We did talk about water the night I posted but I’m sure she would have enjoyed telling me more about life growing up on a farm in rural Ireland.

They collected rainwater in butts and used it for washing. She insists that your hair feels softer washed in rain water and who am I to question that. She was a young girl when she washed it that way, it had never seen a perm or a colour, and I’m sure it was softer then than it is now. Perhaps our Unilever colleagues can offer some evidence here. I guess rainwater is really soft (i.e. low Calcium ion content) so that will make a difference.

We also talked about sanitation. My wife, Angela, remembers going Elfin as a child. In the mid-60s the toilet was still a bench over a bucket in the cowshed and she hated going to the toilet there as a child because the cows were only a few feet away when you were sat down! How different to our children’s experience with 3 WC inside the house and 4th at the bottom of the garden. Never-the-less our youngest still enjoys the occasional ablution in the open air and many of my outdoor mates take some pride in being fellows of the ODL (outdoor defecators league) and the joy of using sphagnum moss instead of paper. But the clichéd “Do bears crap in the woods?” takes on a whole different meaning when you realise that 2.5 billion people have no option but to do what the bears do. And this could become a theme for us in the future. How can we provide sanitation and improved public health for those in the world who are deprived of it? And in the UK can we harness the intellectual power and campaigning energy of Universities United to come up with acceptable technical solutions that don’t use vast amount of potable water?

So when I was on my vacation in Florida I reflected on the worlds need for improved sanitation every time I saw the euphemistic signs for “restrooms”. What was interesting though was that in nearly all the facilities I used the amount of water per flush was stated on the cistern. It was as if they were expecting me to be filling out my Universities United Water Diary whilst I was there. I also thought about the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World a lot. It remains one of my favourite books, I read it as an impressionable sixteen year old, and I’ll have to go back a read it again. As far as I can tell Huxley was a time traveller and has visited present day Orlando. I came back to try and find my copy and stumbled upon a great analysis http://www.huxley.net/. In Brave New World, happiness comes from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug soma. Well I missed out on the promiscuous sex and had to substitute cycling and Sam Adams for soma; but we looked at each and said “we are at the feelies” during a 3-D cinema show at Disney World. The seat puffed out steam, splashed us with water and generated smells as the cartoon characters charged out the screen and made us duck for cover. Orlando is dedicated to consumption of mass-produced goods and whilst we couldn’t find activities with precisely the same names the sporting opportunities of Pharoahs MiniGolf and Baby ‘Gator Wrestlin came pretty close. So it really was a pleasant surprise to see that every patch of landscaped vegetation carried a sign that said “irrigated with recycled water”. It went some way to assuage my guilt at having flown there as the residents are obviously aware of the impact of our excessive consumption of the worlds resources.

But I want to end on a note about the joy of water. My favourite day of the holiday was spent on Daytona Beach. It was cold by Floridian standards and the sea was warmer than the air. So I spent a couple of hours jumping waves with my daughters and a flock of pelicans. The shore was covered in all kinds of birds: sandpipers, herons, egrets and many different gulls. The sandpipers were very busy, dashing about and squabbling, they gave us much joy. But the highlight of the day was sat on a dock, in the inlet behind the beach, watching the spectacular sunset and having dinner. There were lots of birds out on the water and the catfish were literally jumping. Then a Manatee slowly rose from the water and breathed in before slowly sliding back below the surface. We were convinced it looked at us, and they do seem to have a smile on their faces. It was the perfect antidote to the Florida most tourists see. Later that night the Obama campaign was in Kissimee. I didn’t have the energy to attend the midnight rally but how we have since rejoiced that he prevailed!