Oh yes I accept it has its place and is indeed useful (eg the Libyan and Egyptian riots), and ABCs Q&A works it beautifully,  but why do people think that inane information is of any interest to the masses.

And yes I do use Twitter to broadcast links to my Blogs, Websites and more. But not details of my life minute by minute.

Just today, I have seen a photo of a cup of tea that someone thought I needed to know she was having. Another just said ‘it’s bedtime’. Fine just go to bed. Not my business. And yet another advises me how many calories have been burned over the last 20 minutes.

Think about it. These people take the time to thumb this information into their mobile phones or iPads and send it, costing them time they’ll never get back, and telecom fees that are exorbitant. All for what? 1 second of fame?

Or are these people so shallow and insecure, they need us to know what they are doing every second of every day to get their jollies?

“I’m eating a hamburger. Nom Nom.”

“Time to get blonded”

“Must. Resist. Temptation”.

And these are just a few of the non-event comments thrown out daily. In most cases, the rest of us have NO frickin’ idea what the hell they are talking about!

Just sit down in your favourite shopping centre or mall (as in the proper term mall and not the US ‘shopping mall’ ) and watch passers-by. We have become a nation of head down, staring at a mobile phone and thumbing and reading constant streams of nonsense zombies as we shuffle around mindlessly.

And there are those that say “I’ll DIE without my iPhone”. Toughen up princess, you’d get over it. Or am I wrong here and some insidious disease has overtaken our young and not so young?

It’s perplexing. And what is even weirder is that the people I mainly interact with are youngish, urban professionals in either the journalist or PR industry who are paid to write and be lucid and fluid with words.

So a TWEET such as ‘OMG, I am sooooo excited I just wet my pants a little” simply mystifies me…. Especially as he/she has added their name to it. Media professionals have been fired or reprimanded for less. So is it these sorts of TWEETS are accepted now as part of the culture? From an industry who is supposed to, and is proud of, educating us?

ZOMG I. Hope. Not. LOL….

Some made it and many, many did not. One of my favourites was filePro16 that started on the Tandy TRSDOS and Xenix platforms; it was ported to MSDOS and did quite well and the UNIX version still exists. For some reason, The Small Computer Computer never felt the need to go Windows or Mac, much to I consider their loss. I loved this program as I could use it’s 4GL language ‘behind the scenes’ to develop almost any standalone application I wanted. I once even did a Lotto predict system based on past number occurrences, and it printed graphs on an NEC Pinwriter dot matrix printer using CHR$ codes for graphics blocks!

dBase II -> III – IV survived too – for a while – until others usurped including KnowledgeMan (which I also liked), Borland Paradox, Lotus Approach and ultimately Microsft Access while the  original Visicalc spreadsheet was overtaken first by Lotus 1-2-3 and then Multiplan. Microsoft Word wiped out Multimate, WordPerfect, Lotus AMI Pro and of course Wordstar. The excellent and easy to use PFS series was never to be seen again and the same fate applied many other brilliant tools that simply couldn’t match the Microsoft marketing dollar, and the stroke of genius employed by Australia’s own Daniel Petre that was Microsoft Office.

What did fascinate me at the time was the birth of the ‘integrated package’ in the guise of Lotus Symphony, Open Access, Framework and Visi-On (for starters). They promised a single application that allowed all the major functionality of at least word processor, spreadsheet and database, but added the mouth-watering ability of sharing data without the need to export and import information between applications.

While the idea was sheer genius, and I had huge fun playing with and reviewing these applications for PCUser mag back in the 80s – I became a bit of a specialist – the concept never really took off. Some interactions needed knowledge of macro processing (also huge fun) and despite the eye candy of the graphing and charting capabilities (anyone remember Boeing Graph? That was a CRACKER that integrated with filePro and Scripsit WP), eventually the introduction of Windows sent these applications to the scrap heap.

I don’t know if Ashton-Tate (dbase and Framework) even exists anymore. Lotus is an IBM company that seems to be sulking behind a door somewhere despite still having the very best personal info manager in ‘Organiser’ – yes it still exists – and Borland? Who knows? I must check one day.

Where am I going with this?

The internet has spawned a similar situation in an odd sort of way, except that integrated applications are now developed by independent vendors that share an API – a programming interface allowing data to be exchanged and shared between them. Think Facebook and Twitter talking to each other, or Outlook and Evernote for starters.

Social media seems to be the catalyst for this; in many ways I think it is a top idea, but I do have reservations about a) security of this shared data and b) the frustration many may get as it is not always as easy as it seems to make all these apps work together.

More importantly though, when the original integrated applications came out such as Lotus Symphony, they had price tags of over A$1000 – a lot of money in the 80s. Today many are free (there is a warning about security there alone so check the User Agreements) or around the $30 – $50 mark.

So the question arises. Do you really need it? I wonder how many tens of thousands of applications in this price range have been installed and discarded over the last 18 months.

And let’s not ask the same question of phones!

As journalists/writers/commentators, I consider we are at the frontline of those of us considering ourselves wordsmiths. To a large degree, therefore, I believe, this makes us sort of custodians of the English language – as per the Oxford Dictionary and the Macquarie equivalent. I do accept that we are also, at times, the harbinger of change as well as the reporters of it. Watergate is the best example I can think of and since that particularly nasty little situation, every journalist at some time or another has probably labelled something “blah-gate”.

Sad but true.

But what concerns me is the influence into the lexicon of American-isms. Just lately I have seen references in journo’s writings to ‘humor’ as against ‘humour’, ‘favorite’ versus ‘favourite’. And even ‘tire’ instead of ‘’tyre’.

(Interestingly, I had an email from a US journo the other night that used the word ‘favor’ in it, and he had actually placed ‘favour’ in parentheses directly after this as if I needed a translation!)

Has this phenomenon been caused by a need to shorten words due to SMS or Twitter? Do journalists have their word processor dictionaries set to ‘US English’ instead of ‘Australian English’ or ‘UK English’? If so why? Or has it been decided that the ‘American way’ is the way forward? I would hate to lose Australian journalistic identity based on what amounts to US TV and movie influence.

Many examples abound with liberal sprinklings of ‘cookie’, ‘trunk’, ‘hood’, ‘gas’, ‘sidewalk’ and ‘crosswalk’ immediately springing to mind.

What I find interesting is that we are fast (seemingly) to let Americanisms infiltrate our language/linguistics/lexicon as are many other countries, but the US population doesn’t reciprocate to my knowledge. I have been to the US a number of times and while I have been pressed to say ‘G’day’ to hoots of laughter or ‘You call that a knife?’ for instant amusement, (making me feel like some parrot on display in a zoo), I don’t think I have ever heard a US person say ‘bonzer’, ‘ripper’, ‘bewdy’, ‘sanger’, ‘boozer’, ‘bloke’ or even ‘mate’ as part of normal language – other than to attempt to be “in” at the time.

I wonder why?

I remember many years ago watching an episode of Disney on TV (it was always on a Sunday at 6:30pm) that was from one of the “worlds” and it entailed the story of Tom Sawyer (or it may have been Huckleberry Finn, this was 45 years ago or so). In the dialogue (there’s two more, ‘dialog and analog’), Tom, or it may be Huck, say to an unknown person, “Do you speak American?” My Dad almost went apoplectic.

He wasn’t anti-American – well no more than WW II may have affected UK soldiers in certain areas. He in fact loved things such as Westside Story, South Pacific, the Boston Pops and more, but like me, felt that self-identity was important and shouldn’t be usurped.

So I ask? Are we over influenced and are heading down this path?

I did hear a kiddliewink (about 8 yo) the other day in a broad what would be called ‘Westies accent’ in Sydney, refer to ‘his Mom’ to a friend. I have yet to hear a ‘Pop’ thankfully, other than referencing a grandfather.

How individuals discuss, enunciate, talk or argue is their business of course. But should we as journalists/writers/commentators push any influence on to our readers? Or are we just being lazy, accepting what our WP spellchecker is saying or falling into the SMS/TXTing trap to minimise the number of characters we use?

Or is it simply progress? I’d value and love your opinion on this.

It’s the smartphone.

Not the fact of the phone itself; I admit I own one and my current Motorola does all I want of it – well mostly – and it does its primary focus quite happily. Making and taking calls. I can count the photos I have taken with one hand.

No I mean the overuse of the smartphone for photography, and in particular, photography used to illustrate pieces bashed out by journalists for public consumption via websites. They look awful, often have the shakes, lousy depth of field, shocking low light capability, inferior colour and are often out of focus.

Well yes I know that pretty much sums up the quality of imagery of any smartphone ever made (barring the Nokia N8 which is really a camera with a phone attached) but what I question is why anyone would allow their name to be placed on a photo taken by one for professional use? Is this the very best they can do? If they are “on assignment”, isn’t there a decent camera in the office bought for this very purpose they can grab, or don’t they possess their own?

I just don’t understand how anyone can allow second rate work to be published. Or even how editors allow it. I certainly wouldn’t, and I don’t know of any newspapers or magazine that would either, unless it was the only shot in existence of a particularly newsworthy event. So why is it OK for the web? Is it supposed to be in some way connected to the gritty almost underground way of the web? If so, it doesn’t work for me. I’d like to be able to see the detail of any pictures.

Or are there not the skills to operate a decent camera? If that is the case, surely this means a person doesn’t have all the tools they need to do the job. Somewhat like a carpenter that can’t measure or a truck driver with only a moped licence.

The only other explanation I can think of is that striving for the best is no longer the aim or the ambition, and “it’ll do” is just fine thank you very much. Hey they are getting it free so why should I stress?

If that’s the case, it is a very sad pointer to the state of our industry, so I really hope it’s not true.

What I have found interesting is the number of comments that hint the problem is not that a magazine is published in a physical form, but more that content over the last few years has become stale, ads dominate, celebrity gossip is king, deep and meaningful, well researched articles are thin on the ground and duplicity between magazines, recycling overseas content and blandness seems to rule.

All grist for the mill.

Others say that newsstand magazines are too expensive ($8.95 / edition seems to be the norm) compared to online editions and gossip – a major drawcard it seems – is free via the ‘net. (There is an irony that people want gossip free but also want the deep and meaningful, well researched articles as a freebie too.).

Ignoring the obvious that someone, somewhere has to pay for the development and creation of this content, there is also the interesting question of just how much this “free” content via the web does cost?

Let’s do some extrapolation here. Some very quick research shows that an ‘average’ ADSL connection costs around $49.95/month on a 2 year plan. That equals almost $600/annum. Let’s for the sake of the argument say that random browsing, Facebook, Twitter and downloading music (which you also pay extra for via iTunes say), movies (also technically chargeable) and email is worth 75% of that, meaning $150 is spent on other things.

Those other things could conceivable be reading magazines that you would normally subscribe to?  That, to see again you’ll have to login back for and pay on line time for yet again. Or print out and cost paper and ink and filing space.

Expensive.

And what is odd is that every person I have ever spoken to, when asked if they prefer a PDF file for a software manual to a ‘real’ paper version, it is universal that a ‘paper’ version is far preferable. It can be read in more places, is easier to add annotations to, re-read, filed for future reference, cross referenced, searched, can be taken with you and more.

Let’s now flip this and look at the role of the advertiser. The major strike weapon of the magazine advertiser is the full page ad. Can this be achieved via a website?

No.

What can you get? Banner ads, intrusive video ads (who likes the ones that popup unannounced and unwanted on the www.smh.site). And broadcast newsletters. That can simply be trashed without reading or the reader can easily unsubscribe to. Go to www.mailchimp.com and look at the stats of newsletter clicks.

A niche paper magazine (in our case camcorders and cameras) on the other hand has been purchased purposely. They want to know about the specific product written about. For the reader of more generalised magazines, they do not necessarily have an interest in anything else. This makes the readership of say 10 pages of a 60 page magazine very expensive to get a smaller less in-depth review than we would give. Also of note is that unlike most mainstream mag reviewers, Auscam reviewers and contributors are in the main full time experts in the video industry – there are TV producers, documentary makers, audio professionals and more. So the accumulated knowledge is also far greater than most mainstream equivalents.

Additionally, mainstream magazines are not going to cover tutorials on lighting, audio, effects, scriptwriting and so on. I’d argue that on a website alone, these are difficult to implement, but in conjunction WITH a website, a magazine can make these come alive.

And of course these scenarios apply equally to a magazine whether it is on video, photography, car repairs, polar bear husbandry or needlework!

My summation then is simply this: the movement of magazine content to web is seen by the industry as inevitable, as magazine sales are waning. Reading between the lines of public comment however tells me that the reason magazine sales are dwindling is simply as people are fed up with the lack of decent content. Anything else is an excuse and the industry is blinkered and trying to hide from it.

What I have had problems with is trying to get the various divisions to talk to each other, and also be able to simply talk to them!

For example, in the last 48 hours, my wireless (HPSA+) broadband connection, which is my lifeline to the world in many areas – internet, TV, radio – was ‘throttled’ as the bill had not been paid. I have a 10GB plan which costs me $109/month.

By contrast, my brother, 6Km away can get ADSL 2 with 100GB download, and also had an offer for free local calls, cut price STD and mobile calls and other goodies for the same price. But he also gets free to air TV and radio through normal channels.

Anyway, as I was throttled (I never saw the bill in contest by the way) I had the need to call Telstra – note NOT Big Pond – to resolve this issue. Nine phone calls later, I finally got through to someone. You see, although I rang 125111, the number on the web and their bills - for access to Telstra Wireless Broadband – note NOT Big Pond – I kept getting answered by a Big Pond operator. In the Philippines mostly although I suspect a few Mumbais or similar in the mix. They wouldn’t say.

Every time I was transferred on, I would end up in some oddball department  such as iPad SIM activation, mobile phone faults and others I couldn’t understand the accents of. Finally, I was put through to accounts, also suspiciously in the Philippines, and was advised the account had a bar on it due to the non-payment of the bill. I promised to pay it next day at the local Post Office, and ring back immediately with the receipt number. I specifically asked for the direct line number to ring to advise of this, and duly kept my promise, rang back and was told the bar would be removed within 24 hours.

28 hours later, on a supposedly 4Mbs+ link, (that I had got regularly before), I was getting at best 256kps and my work was running at a crawl. And an unreliable one at that.

As a publisher and journalist dealing with large images for print, this was insufferable, so once again I rang 125111 – as told, the correct number for Telstra Wireless Broadband contact. Note,  NOT Big Pond. I again ended up going through the Big Pond merry-go-round, six times, before getting on to “Kelly on the Gold Coast”.

Thank the pixel gods for that. Over the next 20 minutes or so, Kelly sussed out where and who I should be talking to, organised the transfer of the call, and the issue was fixed. I explained to the nice lady in Telstra – note NOT Big Pond – Wireless Broadband about the 125111 versus 13-POND telephone number issue and she promised to look into it. The fact that 12 separate phone calls to 125111 kept putting me through to 13-POND means Telstra has a serious problem in this area – oh and of course I was the “first” to come across it! As a journo in IT, if I had a dollar for every time I have heard THAT statement, I would be very, very rich and not living in The Shed I can promise you.

There are two footnotes to this story:

If Telstra (and they are not alone in this) is serious about businesses in the country, bearing in mind I AM a business, need constant access and have a need for large uploads and downloads each month, then 10GB is a joke. I have been told my next bill will be $600+ as I went over the 10GB limit! As time goes on, business – both city and country based – are relying more and more on technology. Banks and farmers, musicians, artists and the local supermarket. Some do it by choice; others are forced into it by “systems”. But if the cost is as prohibitive as it is now, the cost of doing that business makes it impossible to do that business. If you know what I mean.

If I have to pay $600+ simply to have internet access, when someone in the city or a major town can get 10 times the access I get for $109, why would I stay here? It’s not as if I am in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert! I am 6 Kms from a major regional town for goodness sake!

I watch iView from the ABC as all I have is patchy coverage via normal means, have discovered 7NOW from Channel 7 (WIN and GWN (Prime) are so snowy and fuzzy, unless it’s something major I don’t watch) and SBS is only available for some weird reason after 8pm!), listen to Perth radio via the ‘net and *cough* get the occasional download for TV programs I cannot get. Dragon’s Den and Alan Sugar’s The UK Apprentice specifically.  Nothing overly extraordinary then.

So how’s this for a thought. In the country, 3 hours south of Perth, and too far from an exchange to get ADSL so forced to use HPSA+ wireless broadband, the technology designed for those that do NOT have the luxury access the city and major regional locale people get have to pay 10 times extra plus for it! And it’s not as if it is reliable…

How ridiculous is that! When I spoke to Telstra about this, I was informed that “it cost us millions to install the infrastructure, so someone has to pay”. I also spoke to the Department of Consumer Affairs who said they could not get involved in what a company charges for its services.

And yet, if I want a phone line put in, as I understand it, I *could* be in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert, and it would cost me no more than if I lived in Pyrmont. And the call charges are the same.

Rip off is such a dirty phrase. Opportunism anyone?

As a teenager, I was very involved in the Boy Scouts, and I remember vividly (another irony) that one of the ‘tests’ for a badge – which were very coveted – was for memory. The way to learn to get a good memory was to place a few items on a tray, memorise them, have the tray taken away and then write down as many as you could remember. As you got better, then you simply kept adding more items to the tray and repeated the exercise.

It works too!

I have always had a decent memory – I can remember really stupid things such as phone number in the UK 40+ years ago, the rego number of all the cars I have owned and directions to places. Another trick I learned was to use mnemonics to reference street names in sequence for example.

Names I do have an issue with; I can never remember the art of repeating the name back when someone introduces themselves and I think it is possibly too late to change that one now. But a new trick I did think of the other day seems to work in other areas quite well.

Back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, when memory was at a premium and developers fought for every single 1K they could get, a very neat program came out called “Sidekick” and this took advantage of a little bit of protected memory, allowing you to load a small notepad and calendar/diary/address book. (I have a theory that the reason many programs these days are so bloated is that developers no longer have to do this. They have all the memory they need and have therefore got lazy).

So what you ask? They are a dime a dozen these type of applications.

Not then (circa 1984). We only had MSDOS and 640K which was NOT multitasking – ie: technically only one program at a time could be running –  so this was a MAJOR breakthrough. Millions and millions of copies were sold, and this marked the beginning of, at the time, one of the behemoths of the software industry, Borland. Eventually Borland fell apart by trying to do what so many did – take on Microsoft. But that’s another story.

I got to wondering; could I train my brain to keep a small piece of my memory “protected” and make it available for easy recall. And because I knew in what part of my memory I stored this “stuff”, I wouldn’t have to rack my brains so to speak to find stuff I wanted to remember. Somewhat like putting your keys and wallet always in the same place if you like.

Early testing seems to indicate it works. The longer term is the true indicator of course.

I’ll keep you posted. If I can remember.

As I get older, I am starting to forget things. Nothing serious you understand, just small things, mainly of the “I must remember that” just to be ironic. A good example would be a story I might hear on the radio and want to pass on, or my mental shopping lists might not be as sharp as they used to be.

As a teenager, I was very involved in the Boy Scouts, and I remember vividly (another irony) that one of the ‘tests’ for a badge – which were very coveted – was for memory. The way to learn to get a good memory was to place a few items on a tray, memorise them, have the tray taken away and then write down as many as you could remember. As you got better, then you simply kept adding more items to the tray and repeated the exercise.

It works too!

I have always had a decent memory – I can remember really stupid things such as phone number in the UK 40+ years ago, the rego number of all the cars I have owned and directions to places. Another trick I learned was to use mnemonics to reference street names in sequence for example.

Names I do have an issue with; I can never remember the art of repeating the name back when someone introduces themselves and I think it is possibly too late to change that one now. But a new trick I did think of the other day seems to work in other areas quite well.

Back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, when memory was at a premium and developers fought for every single 1K they could get, a very neat program came out called “Sidekick” and this took advantage of a little bit of protected memory, allowing you to load a small notepad and calendar/diary/address book. (I have a theory that the reason many programs these days are so bloated is that developers no longer have to do this. They have all the memory they need and have therefore got lazy).

So what you ask? They are a dime a dozen these type of applications.

Not then (circa 1984). We only had MSDOS and 640K which was NOT multitasking – ie: technically only one program at a time could be running –  so this was a MAJOR breakthrough. Millions and millions of copies were sold, and this marked the beginning of, at the time, one of the behemoths of the software industry, Borland. Eventually Borland fell apart by trying to do what so many did – take on Microsoft. But that’s another story.

I got to wondering; could I train my brain to keep a small piece of my memory “protected” and make it available for easy recall. And because I knew in what part of my memory I stored this “stuff”, I wouldn’t have to rack my brains so to speak to find stuff I wanted to remember. Somewhat like putting your keys and wallet always in the same place if you like.

Early testing seems to indicate it works. The longer term is the true indicator of course.

I’ll keep you posted. If I can remember.

Twenty five or so years ago a close friend lamented that it was weird that we couldn’t have some sort of mobile ‘tricorder’ like device and chat to others without wires from and to almost anywhere in the world. If we had known then what we know now! (Well I’d be a millionaire to start with!)

But there are some downsides to this ‘communications everywhere’ as I discovered last night.

 I am in Sydney for a lightning visit to get a short, sharp training session on the new Panasonic 3D camcorder. This means that everything happens two hours ‘earlier’ than home so to speak. So at 10:30pm last night, it was ‘body time’ only 8:30pm. (There is an early morning trap in this too but that’s for another time). As such, I was till wide awake to watch the Belgian GP from Spa, where Mark Webber had grabbed pole.

Normally Grand Prix’ last for around 90 minutes or so, so imagine my bloody annoyance at around 11:30 when the ABC tweets that Hamilton had won and Webber was second and the race finished in heavy rain. On TV, there was still another 20 minutes to run. Bear in mind in Perth of course this would have been 9:30pm and the telecast hadn’t even started!

Yes I know I could have had Twitter turned off, but that defeats the purpose of why I have a Blackberry; why don’t the networks just agree that they won’t broadcast any sporting results until all telecasts/ radio broadcasts have finished? The F1 is live via 1HD, so they managed to not do anything until about 2 hours after it had actually finished so surely another 30 minutes wouldn’t have hurt? Or 2:30 catering for WA (for a change).

And yes I know that if the ABC hadn’t tweeted it, someone else would possibly have done so. I am happy to take that risk, but to me, a news service doing it is akin to Ch 9 spoiling Ch 7’s thunder say, by having the results of a delayed telecast as a newsflash. Let common sense and fairness prevail, and think of the viewers for a change I say.

What a load of nonsense. Even the thick crims don’t take too long to work out that if they travel at 141 kph, they’ll escape. And on roads such as the major freeways in Perth, that sort of speed is not too difficult to achieve, after all, it is only 31 kph – around 18mph – above the legal speed limit on the Forrest Highway and other country roads.

So an untrained driver can simply accelerate away, and a highly trained police pursuit driver has to slow down and give up. The Sweeney and Gene Hunt must be appalled.

Some weeks back, right past my house, twice, at night, a car with its lights off was being pursued by Police with lights and siren blaring. I could hear them from 400 metres away. If I had been driving, or even a pedestrian, I would have KNOWN there was an emergency in place, and put myself in as safe a position as possible. That is common sense.

I accept that most chases are probably stolen cars, or idiots trying to evade booze buses. But at any point in time I see one, I don’t know if it might be a bank robbery and someone has weaponry on board or whatever, so I am all for the Police to get these morons. If they need to go above a silly 140kph to do so, then let ‘em I say. After all, we want to get rid of the bad guys, and if they crash and kill or maim themselves, who is to blame? Not the Police. They didn’t steal the car, get pissed and try to evade a road block or simply decide to joyride.  Consequences for actions people, consequences for actions.

Also at the back of my mind I must say though, if whether this silly 140 kph security blanket is partly, as Police tell me, they have to use bog standard Falcons and Commodores with, as a mate in the tyre business says, inferior tyres on them.

Either which way, why on earth are we giving the crims a head start? You may just as well tell them where the speed cameras are being set up.

Oh wait …

You see, becuase I am now living in The Shed in the Field, I am reliant on water from a rainwater tank, and yesterday, as the rain has been almost non existent, it ran out. Half way through a shower with shampoo in my hair in fact. Luckily there was still enough in the kettle to rinse that out.

At present, it’s an inconvenience, but not a calamity. True, I cannot get a water carter here until probably Monday or Tuesday to top it back up, but I can survive by nipping over to my brother’s place 7Km away and fill up a 20l container I have that is normally used to brew beer. And as I am hopping on a Q-jet tomorrow for a trip to Sydney for a Panasonic launch, I only need to survive a maximum 48 hours with no running water.

What has been interesting though, is realising just how much water you DO use on a daily basis. In fact in certain ways, it is quite scary what we take for granted and literally flush or drain away without a thought.  I thought 20l would be heaps for two days; cups of coffee, enogh to wash dishes and a bucket or two for the littlest room in the house. But even the simplest things you suddently realise need water!

The table I use as a dining room table needed a wipe down, but the sponge cloth I use to clean such things was bone dry. Without thinking, and by habit, I turned on the tap and held the sponge underneath to wet it …. Cooking tea last night, again by habit I put the saucepan under the tap to fill it for boiling potatoes. And do you know how much you use whn you do the washing up? I do now. Around 5 litres!

I now have a much better appreciation of the value of water after this exercise. You might like to give it a try? Get a home brew beer making container, fill it, and see how long it lasts withiut using a tap. Look on the bright side, when it runs out, you can make some beer and save a bucket load.

* Actually that was Joni Mitchell