Finally, there’s something to unite Britain – disgust at what is happening to our waterways and seas

theguardian.com:

After the third lockdown ended, in that summer when everyone felt faintly broken, we ran away to the sea.

At first it rained torrentially. But then the sun began tentatively to come out, and my son went snorkelling in a hidden rocky cove near the Cornish cottage we had rented. When the next day he started being violently sick, my first thought was food poisoning. But the whole family had eaten the same food, and the only one to fall ill was the lone swimmer.

And that’s how I learned, after all these years of happily swimming in British rivers and seas, just how filthy they have become. That’s why, as a family, we no longer go near the water after heavy rain (the most likely time for sewers to be overwhelmed, and for emergency storm overflows to respond by dumping sewage into waterways). It’s why we have a faintly depressing new holiday routine of waking up and checking the Surfers Against Sewage app – which logs all the latest discharges around the coast – before heading to the beach, and why for paddleboarding at home I follow a Twitter account that sends alerts whenever Thames Water dumps something unmentionable in Oxfordshire’s rivers.

Swimming in the cool green under the willows on a hot summer’s day, overlooked by nothing but passing swans, is one of those small free joys that everyone should try once in life. But nothing ruins the romance of the water’s edge like the feeling you may be playing bacterial Russian roulette, which helps explain why of all the issues at play in the current local election campaign, sewage seems rather unexpectedly to be bubbling to the top.

Tory MPs are still getting angry letters, and in some cases vitriolic abuse on social media, a year and a half after being whipped to vote against an