Towards Ennistone

The late Roger Deakin (see my earlier post below) "excavates the watery subconscious of the English landscape and sees reflected in it our need for intimacy and playfulness with nature" in this account of some english streams and rivers published on OpenDemocracy in 2001:
"The wild, biologically purified water of an unpolluted natural stream is quite different from the abstract tap water, which is much more like electricity or gas: something you turn on or off, control and pay for. In his book, Reflected in Water, Colin Ward argues that to have turned water into a commodity is unnatural, because water is a gift, like air and sunlight. It wasn’t until the 1920s that mains water began to arrive in many places in Britain, and people began the adjustment from the familiar taste of their own living, local water to the lifeless ubiquity that comes from a tap. Water used to be an absolute; now there are two kinds, the living and the lifeless."
www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=4&debateId=62&articleId=406