It's raining, it's pouring

At long last it's raining again. I never thought I'd say it but I was getting tired of the constant dry weather. It's just not something we know how to handle in this country. We may seem to like complaining that British weather is typically awful (cold, wet, windy) but I think most of us prefer having some rain to a landscape that's brown and parched dry. Not to mention the water shortages that are now being forecast in the news.

The problem is, we're generally not very good at water management, at anywhere from the micro level of individual houses and gardens to the macro level of reservoirs and mains supply. If this summer is any indication of years to come then I think we're going to have to learn pretty quickly.

So what can be done to ease our problems? Well, at the macro level I don't really know, beyond fixing all the leaking pipes. I'm no expert, after all. But on an individual level there's a huge amount that we can do.

Some things are very simple, like not running a bowl of water to wash up just the bowl and plate you used for breakfast or not washing your hands under running water. Others require more thought and some expense, too, such as getting a dual-flush toilet or rigging up water butts to collect from your drain pipes to give you a supply of water for the garden. If we all did things like this we could save a phenomenal amount of water and save ourselves from shortages and hose-pipe bands.

Do you have any other water-saving suggestions?