Learning to respect water

BOTTLED WATER COSTS more than petrol and yet most of us flush around 50 litres of drinking water down the loo every day. Fifty litres is a tank of petrol. The water in our lavatory cisterns is as clean as that in the heavily marketed and transported bottles that line our supermarket shelves, but we are as careless of tap water as of fresh air. How can we be so inconsistent? On one level we venerate water with Evian and sacred wells; on another we treat it as a national nuisance that falls unbidden from the sky, spoiling our shoes and holidays.