Water Wars Part Deux

This week on Five Live Breakfast, they've been talking about the namby pamby Southern water shortage and different possible solutions to it.

It was interesting to me that nobody mentioned the obvious one: stop building houses where there isn't enough water for the existing population.

The solutions they did talk about included building a Giant Pipeline From the North to the South, also known as Building a Giant Terrorist Target That Stretches From Yorkshire to Kent. They mentioned also the old one about towing icebergs, demonstrating the usual lack of joined-up thinking at the BBC. It won't be long before they're running a climate change feature worrying about the shrinking ice caps etc., but for this week they've quietly forgotten about that one, and gone back to the old 70s idea of towing an iceberg to the Kent Desert.

Smart. And straight out of Futurama. Nice to know Prof. Farnsworth is alive and well.

Oh, and lest we forget: solution #3 is seeding clouds with chemicals to make it rain, which we know works because the CIA do it at Glastonbury every year. This technique is also known as Stealing Rain From Other People Who Will Then Have A Water Shortage Instead.

The good news is that, after the coldest February for 10 years, we're currently in the coldest March for 20 years. What next? The coldest April for 30 years? The coldest August for 70 years? Etc. etc.

This week I've learned that the driest inhabited place in the UK is St. Osyth in Essex (went there on holiday once when I were a nipper) and the wettest is some village in - surprise! - The Lake District.

So the easy solution to this problem is obviously to build a million new homes in Cumbria instead of in the South East. What's wrong with that?