Did Timothy take Paul’s advice about water?

The headline on the tabloid said, ‘Britain running out of water’. I don’t believe this. Indeed, I never believe scare stories about the world going to pot. But water is a fascinating subject. Considering how important it is to us, we know extraordinarily little about it. G.K. Chesterton used to say, ‘There is something inherently comic in the fact that our water is brought to us by who knows what from who knows where, often hundreds of miles away.’ There are more than 1,408 million cubic kilometres of water on the earth’s surface, and this total has changed little in the whole of geologic time. But nearly all of it is in the oceans (97.25 per cent). All the rain and clouds contain less than 0.001 per cent, and lakes, no matter how big, only 0.01 per cent, while rivers — including giant ones like the Amazon and Mississippi, even less — under 0.0001 per cent. The ice caps and all the glaciers put together amount to only 2 per cent of the total and so even if they melted completely — highly unlikely — the sea level would not rise much.

Years ago, in summer, I used to borrow a delightful little stone whitewashed house overlooking Buttermere in the Lake District. It had a wooden verandah, covered in, and I would sit there in the evenings in all weathers, watching what happened. Everything was to do with water. Across the lake were Red Pike and other gigantic mountains. When it rained, black and pewter-coloured clouds would crash into the tops and release water in prodigious quantities. It would cascade down the gullies in foaming becks, waterfalls and spouts, often leaping high into the air and bringing down with its force countless minute pieces of rock, so not just rain-water but a substantial part of the mountainside was moving downhill into the lake.