Diddly Squat: A Year on the Farm by Jeremy Clarkson

Author:Jeremy Clarkson [Clarkson, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405946544
Google: OwoUEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08T5T83VJ
Published: 2021-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

October

Eau no, my pipe dream’s sprung a leak

Here’s something juicy to get your head round this morning: 97.2 per cent of the water on Earth is in the oceans, and a little more than 2 per cent is stored as ice in glaciers and at the poles. Whereas just 0.023 per cent is to be found in our lakes, inland seas, rivers, soil and atmosphere.

Happily, about thirty times more than that is stored as ground water beneath our feet. If you go out today and dig a hole in your back garden, you will eventually find it, whether you live in Alice Springs, St Petersburg, Montevideo or Hemel Hempstead.

Even the Sahara Desert is floating on a vast underground ‘lake’. A study has suggested it covers a massive area beneath Libya, Chad and Algeria and could be 250ft deep.

So there we are, then. Problem solved. We can bathe and shower until we glisten with a pinky, wholesome goodness. We can water our gardens until our plants are giddy with the refreshing zestiness of it all, and the entire population of the planet can hydrate itself until we all look like some kind of hosepipe-based accident in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

What’s more, we have it in our minds that the water deep below the surface of the Earth fell as rain perhaps three million years ago and has spent all that time absorbing enriching minerals from the rocks it has passed through, so that it will make our brains big and our colons clean.

That’s certainly what I thought when I sank a borehole on the farm earlier this year. The drill went down 300ft. A pump was inserted. And out came … well, it’s tricky to say what exactly.

It looked like water and it smelt like water, which is to say it smelt of nothing at all. But after just two months the irrigation system in the fields jammed up, all the crops were covered in a weird white residue and at home the dishwasher, washing machine and shower all ground to a halt.

Tests revealed that the borehole was delivering a curious and possibly lethal cocktail of manganese, sodium and sulphates. The levels were so far beyond legal limits that if anyone even stepped in a puddle of it, they’d immediately grow two heads.

The problem is that there’s only a finite amount of water on Earth. What we have now is what the dinosaurs lived on. It’s what the amoebae climbed out of, after they had grown legs. It’s what cooled the volcanoes back when everything was hot and messy, and, if you’re that way inclined, it’s what God used to water the apple tree in the Garden of Eden.

It’s said that if you drink tap water in London, it will have passed through at least six other people before it got to you, but that’s nonsense. It will have passed through many more than that, and a few dogs, and the odd woolly mammoth, and even a few brontosauruses.

It will

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