We had a lot of rain yesterday. It started in the early morning. I can’t say when. I popped into the garden at 7.30 am, holding my umbrella. I had one task and that was to see the rain gauge. It registered 10 mm, a satisfying amount after a very dry month. Just 4 mm in total before this, which I had been tallying from the rain gauge. Just two rainy days, on the 1st August– 1 mm and on the 13th – 3 mm. When you consider that average August rainfall in London is 48 mm, it tells you in figures just how dry it has been. So 10 mm was more than welcome. At long last giving the garden a good soaking. I came back into the garden at 11 am, when the rain had stopped, and took the rain gauge reading. It was 24 mm; so in one morning we’d had half a month’s rain.
Our three metre cubes (IBCs) which were all stone dry, are now about a third full. About 350 litres, or more usefully, about 54 large watering cans full. The cascade at the back of the stage area of the shelter had filled from barrel to barrel. The pond too was sighing with relief after those long, hot dry weeks. By no means to the top, but several centimetres higher with good, clean, oxygenated water.
I was reading the paper a few days ago, about bottled water selling at £19 a bottle. The water is on the menu at La Popote, a Michelin-guide restaurant in Cheshire. It launched a water-only menu featuring bottles from around Europe. The Palace Vidago water, a Portuguese sparkling water, was the £19 bottle. But you get for this price a water sommelier, and the water is served in wine glasses.
To my mind, water is water. There have been many blind tests and most people can’t tell the difference between tap water and bottled natural water. If you buy bottled water, you end up with an empty plastic bottle. Most of these end up in landfill, only 25% are recycled, but even these don’t end up as a water bottle but some down-cycled excuse, like the underlay for a road.
I found this on Aqualine Uk’s site:
‘In a study conducted by the Science in School (a non profit European journal for teachers) participants were asked to taste tap water and several types of bottled water in a blind test. The results showed that the majority of the participants could not identify which sample was tap water and which was bottled water.
Similarly, another study published in Science in School found that while some participants preferred bottled water, the differences in taste between tap and bottled water were minimal. The study concluded that the preference for bottled water is largely psychological, driven by branding and the idea that bottled water is cleaner or purer.’
Thames Water sells its water for £2.5 per cubic metre. A cubic metre is 1000 litres, so 0.25 p per litre. Bottled water, not the £19 variety, but the standard 500 ml, sells for £1 or more. That’s at least 800 times the price of tap water.