We're bad, in this country, at handling water. (Never mind strong drink.) When we have it in plenty, we resort to a device known as arterial drainage, ie we run it off into the sea, as fast as we can, in narrow, deep channels often. Store some of it? Don't be daft. There's always more. But now, scientists are telling us that there may not be that much more, for all our wasteful ways. Well, in the old days (ie a couple of decades ago - anyway), you learned to be careful enough with the spring (ie drinking) water, because you had to haul it yourself in buckets from the convenient little, man made trough a field or so away, or to pump it by hand in another townland.
And it won't be news to some of you that many a house in the country still has no laid on water, but lives by one of these gifts of nature, or has had to bore on his own land for it.
Costing quite a few hundred pounds. Fine. Your own supply of water, no thanks or payment to any public body. But there is a snag. You have to test that the water is pure enough for human drinking. That done, you're fine. At any rate until this marvellous new chemical farming comes in. We don't know a lot about ground water, the stuff that lies down among the rocks and hidden reservoirs and streams. So that, you begin to fear that slurry spread a few fields away may seep into your supply of the pure and crystal stuff.
Hence, you employ an expert to analyse it and advise, say, every year or so. Instead of water charges, it's fees, for your own peace of mind. Nothing comes free in this world. And do you remember how some of the wells your grannie or uncle were kept - as clean as anything in the kitchen. The lovely gush of water bubbling up from a bed of pebbles into a carefully built little reservoir of big stones.
Above the water line, all was white as a tablecloth: painted. It was maybe in the shelter of a bigger rock, but no heavy weed was allowed to grow near enough to drop its leaves or seeds in.
It was a craftsman's delight. Much easier to have the laid on pipes, of course. But not everyone can rejoice in that yet. It will never come to us all.