raining

We had a little rain today. Ordinarily it would not have been worth mentioning as it was nothing more than a brief, heavy shower. But in the context of the heatwave we’ve been enduring in UK at the moment it was extremely welcome. I could almost hear the arid, parched soil slurping up the rain like a child sucking up the last of their milkshake through a straw.

Human-caused climate change is here, the evidence if it was ever in doubt is not only right before our eyes, it’s sweating from our pores. And over the winter months we will no doubt have more rain than we want as it overflows river banks and floods fields, businesses and homes. I do wonder what is going on in the water companies about capturing the excess in the winter to provide for the summer. No major new reservoirs have been built since 1992 and while apparently there are plans for new ones they’re not going to be ready until at least the next decade.

According to Ofwat and Greenpeace UK between 2.87 billion to 3 billion litres of water are lost to leaks every single day in England and Wales – that’s around 20% of the treated water that is pumped through the public network! To be fair, they are spending hundreds of millions of pounds fixing leaks and the leakage used to be 40%!

Surfers against Sewage say that in 2024 alone, there were nearly one million sewage discharges into rivers and the sea by water companies – one every 30 seconds.

In the meantime, however, at least £75 billion (taking inflation into account) has been paid as dividends to shareholders by privatised water companies since they were sold off in the 1990s.

Yes, I know there could be other statistics that make the water companies look much better but I leave you to draw your own conclusions from what I have given you. How do you feel having read those statistics?

The information we’re given shapes our opinions. And how we are given that information shapes our opinions. Wherever we get our information / news not neutral. Even the news and information sources that strive hardest to be neutral are still shaped by the editorial opinion of the people who choose what to say and how to say it.

A long time ago I was asked to do some secondary school assemblies on ‘news’. I bought all of the daily national newspapers for one day and did a relatively unscientific trawl through them to see how many of them had the same main front page headline, whether any others carried the same news story anywhere else in their newspaper, and if so where.

Only two made the same story their main headline. Both claimed an exclusive for telling the same story! Other newspapers had that story but it was tucked in the inside pages. None of the other newspapers had a main headline that others also had even on their front page.

I shared this with the students, getting them to guess which newspapers had which headlines (and they always got some of them wrong). I made the point that their world views are shaped by other people – the editors, journalists and headline writers who chose what they considered the most important story (ie the story that would sell most newspapers).

I am amazed that intelligent people don’t realise this. I know of one person who quotes opinion from their newspaper as if it were fact because ‘the paper says…’ Because that newspaper confirms their political stance they accept everything that it says as true.

We wouldn’t do that, would we?

In the end you have to come to a judgment about the source of information you receive. And we have to decide how we share information.

So whom do we trust?

Why do we trust them?

How trustworthy a witness are we?

Why do people trust us?

Be blessed, be a blessing