Hydro challenges of the future

So, the conferences are over and parliament has come out of recess. The silly season, is, apparently, officially over. Seeing the prime minister at his monthly news conference (one of the few unquestionably good things he has been responsible for), it is clear that Blair leads his party from the front - in going bald. He maybe no shrinking violet, but he cannot arrest any shrinkage in his hair acreage. As his follicles recede on both sides of his head, the surviving central lollop of hair looks like the dust thrown up by a dragster speeding across a pink desert (a rubbery one that throws up brown dust). The Labour Party will be in catnip with Gordon Brown's rich locks.
The main challenger to these two heavyweights is David 'Dave' Cameron. The curtain twitchers that form the grassroots of his party should be worried about him, not for the modernising, centrist efforts, but because, for a man so fixated on presentation, his facial features are as shapeless as his policies. Cameron's face is just a quivering amorphous blob, possibly a blank canvas for people to project whatever impressions they personally desire upon, but when he smiles it is like a shimmering ripple in a saucer of milk.
Just to show I'm not criticising all the leaders of the big three parties - Ming Campbell QC, you're alright.
Getting away from the Westminster effluence and to effluence in general, it seems in the future, in the south-east, water won't have merely passed through nine different humans before it reaches you, it will probably have been sewage in a previous form as well. Turning sewage into pure water? That sounds like turning lead into gold. But we will need a bit of H2O alchemy if we are not to run thirsty by the middle of the century. It seems that sewage water is just purified water that currently runs straight into the sea anyway, so our consumption of the liquid that you see coming out of rusting pipes near beaches will be keeping sea levels down to boot.
The University of Sussex is today running a blog-athon trying to get a national survey of online life to examine current attitudes of daily life. I might have been tempted to go on to their website, but I've said pretty much all I want to say here now, so I'll think I'll give it a miss.