Is the humble WC (made in Britain) to blame for the world's water problems?
Toilet: The devil's work?
I’ve made a bad call. Last week, thinking that it was time I did something about my summer wardrobe, I bought a linen suit. I wonder if I’ll ever wear it this year. The news is this morning that May will be as soggy as April. ‘Wettest drought ever,’ said a botanist in the countryside yesterday. Water was standing in the fields as I looked through the rivulets streaking down the outside of the train window. I like the cartoon which shows a policeman up to his knees in water, accosting a flooded householder: ‘Did you use a hose?’
The rain started the moment that the drought was announced. It is set to continue, but no amount of rain this summer – one trembles for Jubilee street parties and the Olympics – can make up for the curiously dry winters that we’ve been having. And the way we use water. We flush it away. For a reasonably sophisticated and prudent nation, the over-exuberance of our plumbing is strange. But then we’ve never had to worry much before. Our green and pleasant land is so because it rains. Think of the waterfalls gushing out of the hillsides in Wales, or the luxuriant, dripping hedges of Devon. We had plenty of rain. People took fewer baths. The power shower hadn’t been invented. The Labour government hadn’t thrown open the doors to uncontrolled immigration. We hadn’t plundered the subterranean aquifers, whose reserves of water were laid down decades, if not centuries ago. Now it looks as though the water-closet is the devil’s work.
Heavy rain: The recent heavy downpours are expected to continue, having started as soon as a 'drought' was declared
It could be said that Britain invented it. The forerunner of the modern WC was championed by the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harrington who A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax in 1596. Stale was a synonym for urine; Ajax was a pun on a contemporary term for a lavatory – jakes. While it was obvious that to Harrington that his countrymen needed to improve their personal hygiene, it never would have occurred to him that they ought also to have saved water.
Now we do. Not just the British – but the inhabitants of almost every country in the world. Spain has been so profligate with its fresh water that the aquifers on the Costa del Sol – known as the Costa del Condom from the number of polytunnels used to grow supermarket salads and fruit – are threatening to go salty.
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Around the world, desertification has led to huge movements of population, as families leave the parched land and crowd into cities. Often, those cities don’t have the water to cope. Western tastes have encouraged the wrong sort of agriculture in African countries, which effectively mine water in order to provide us with French beans. Indian farmers sell water that they can scarce afford – and which will eventually ruin their land – to factories making cotton. The transformation of China will cause an engineering headache. What will the new urban, ultra-clean population drink?
Waste of water: Do we even have a real need for flushing toilets?
Unfortunately, emerging countries see life in the West and think we’ve got it right. They want to be like us. One of the things to which they aspire is the WC. We may not be the worst in this respect. I went to a hotel in Paris a while ago, fitted with a lavatory from Japan; I’m not entirely sure what it did – I didn’t have the courage to switch it on – but it was a different order of experience from that provided by the sanitary plumbing of the Victorian Thomas Crapper.
Still, we can’t escape the fact that Britain invented the WC, and it increasingly seems to be a curse on the world. It’s quite unnecessary. There are self-composing arrangements that require no water and produce, at the end of the process, a very usable manure. The Georgians won Trafalgar and Waterloo without the widespread use of flushing toilets: night-soil men used to tramp through the houses of London to empty cesspits. It was a system that had much to recommend it. Anyone serious about drought should get the world replumbed.
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