Water)
A new water regime must still reward private investors
The weekend’s torrential Yorkshire rain amid a hosepipe ban offered a handy metaphor for the chaos that has befallen the…
How private equity ruined Britain
What has happened to Britain’s rivers isn’t a mistake. The fact that serious pollution is up 60 per cent on…
Portrait of the week: Epping protests, votes at 16 and Ozzy Osbourne dies
Home Six people were arrested during a protest by 1,000 outside the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, which houses asylum…
The truth about Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater
In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to…
The Romans wouldn’t have put up with Thames Water
It is embarrassing to compare Thames Water’s efforts even to the Greeks, let alone the Romans. Most Greek cities got…
The Greek guide to swearing an oath
A lawyer who wished to serve on a jury but was no Christian was given permission to swear his oath…
After the Flood: There Are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
Water – essential to life and civilisation, but also a potentially destructive force – is the theme linking three disparate strands in Shafak’s magnificent new novel
Portrait of the Week: Infected blood apologies, falling inflation and XL bully attacks
Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘I want to make a wholehearted and unequivocal apology’ for a ‘decades-long moral…
Our private terrors
Every summer, during our holiday in Orkney, there is a moment of panic. We’re standing on a dizzying cliff –…
Barometer
Finnish lines Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said she had taken a test for illegal drugs after being filmed at…
Don’t grass
A neighbourly feud is worse than a hosepipe ban
Water isn’t working
Who’s to blame for the shortages?
Holding water
It is clear that the country will soon need a Water Czar. Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa would be the one…
Tehran is repeating the Shah’s mistakes
The Iranian province of Khuzestan is oil-rich but water-poor. At the best of times, the southwestern region is a problem…
Family feeling
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Of the first water
Peaty water ought to be classed as a luxury. You have spent a day on the hill, a’chasing the deer.…
Watergate
Enough has been written about a Conservative government that knows its electoral success depends on Britain remaining a property-owning democracy,…
In my other life, I’m a water engineer
Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with…
Reading the waves
Water accounts for 70 per cent of your planet, and 60 per cent of your body. Yet when do you…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, having continued talks through the night in Brussels, announced that he had achieved a ‘special status’ for…
Two industries in need of regulation
I had a water meter installed in my flat a few months ago. I looked at it just now and…
