The last time this country had anything resembling a bill of rights was 1215, when King John signed the Magna Carta on the banks of the River Thames. Should we ever get around to updating that musty scroll, let’s skip the boring stuff about liberté, égalité, fraternité, etcetera, etcetera, and dive straight in with the basic human right to go skinny dipping in our rivers without catching E. coli.

I say this as someone with an insatiable urge to seek out nature’s pools, strip off, and go for full immersion – no doubt something to do with growing up in the arid Australian outback. My quest has taken me from the Canadian Rockies to the French Pyrenees, from Swedish lakes to Polish rivers. Perhaps my most memorable off-piste plunge was in a canyon in the Kazakhstani steppe, sometime in the mid-90s. Strictly speaking, being buff naked isn’t essential, and sometimes downright embarrassing. But to really experience that euphoric serotonin rush recognisable to any wild swimmer, the colder the water, the better.

However cold it might be, back in the day I’d rarely worry about how clean. And while I’ve long known the UK’s waterways are in trouble, it was shocking to have James Wallace, CEO of River Action, tell me over the phone this week that “most of our rivers don’t look as sick as they really are”. With the government and regulators standing back for years as water companies pump millions of tonnes of sewage into our fresh water – while syphoning off billions of pounds for their shareholders – the RA has emerged as a leading light in the grassroots fightback.  The charity has benefited, Wallace tells me, from the election being set for the same week as Henley Royal Regatta and, as thousands of competitors and spectators prepare to gather for this world-famous event, it has been campaigning to get people to vote for the party most committed to cleaning up our waters. RA has published the results of its citizen-scientist surveys of the Thames, which show that the water in which the races will take place has an average of 27 times more E. coli than the lowest safe standard for swimming. RA and the Regatta organisers have even collaborated in issuing health guidance to competitors, developed with British Rowing and the Rivers Trust, to help ensure they aren’t infected.

With the election looming, Wallace is pleased by how much campaigning there has been on water pollution by the main parties, but disappointed by the lack of commitment to meaningful and urgent change. “Voting is just the first step,” he says. “Post-election we need a huge surge in community action to hold politicians to account, demanding root and branch reform of the regulators to give back their teeth so they can enforce the law.” He points out that there’s more than health at stake. With increasing demand for fresh water matched only by increasing wastage from leaks – running at a staggering three billion litres per day (about 25% of total demand) – we’re just years away from serious water shortages in major cities. “It’s nothing less than an emergency,” he says, “and we need to start acting that way.”

Despite the grim outlook, Wallace remains, as I do, an optimistic environmentalist. He uses the covid response as an example of what can be achieved if the issue is given the importance it deserves, namely, “if the Environment Secretary was one of the most important members of Cabinet instead of stuck at the end of the table.” The #votecleanrivers campaign says the impetus to achieve this must come from below, as with any bill of rights: from “We, the people”. Wallace agrees it’s a matter of using both our hearts, and our heads. “When we get out and reconnect with nature,” he says, “we remember that water is the source of life and underpins our whole existence. And there’s no point promising growth if the lifeblood of our economy runs dry.”

#votecleanrivers

Trailing in the polls, Joe Biden needed a breakout performance against Donald Trump to demonstrate he was fully capable of presenting himself as a strong and steady force to lead the nation for another four years, and that his age wasn’t a factor. 

He sank to the occasion.

Biden’s halting, stammering, raspy, incoherent, word-salad answers confirmed what supporters felt in their hearts but hid behind clenched smiles: despite a successful first term, at 81 he’s not up to a second. Within minutes of his first answer, leading Democrats were calling for him to step aside. The Friday morning reviews were routinely devastating.

Worse yet, his performance made Trump look like a winner, an absurd conclusion considering the fusillade of lies contained within his answers. Indeed, a post-debate accounting by CNN, which sponsored the debate, found that Trump lied a minimum of 30 times. Yet most went unchallenged by either Biden or the moderators, partly because of a rigid format that kept moving him on to the next question, leaving the casual viewer to take Trump’s word as truth.

Democrats weren’t the only ones who were rattled: many foreign leaders watching the debate were remembering when Trump as president had upended the world order by drawing America away from allies and closer to autocrats like Putin, Orban and Xi. The prospect of a Trump Redux left many recalibrating future relations with the United States, including Trump’s promise to impose new tariffs on every import and return to isolationism.

By the following morning some Democrats had circled back to Biden’s defence, insisting that “a bad night” shouldn’t overshadow his considerable accomplishments. That was not surprising. But it didn’t erase his sad performance nor quell the quiet background discussions over how to persuade him to step down so the party can anoint a younger nominee at the August convention.

Otherwise, on the evidence of this debate, voters will have to choose between a serial liar, recently found guilty of felony charges, and a public servant of 50 years who’s approaching the end of the line.

Yes, it was a bad night for Joe Biden. It was a worse night for America.

Four days and counting ’til we cast our votes and I’m suffering from electile dysfunction: failure to become aroused by the political parties. I’m just not turned on by dirty talk about tax cuts or “wealth creation”. I gave up on trying to be rich in the early Noughties after reading research that a “happy wage” was roughly equivalent to £40k. Apparently there was no significant increase in contentment for any pay rise after that, although being poorer could easily cause unhappiness (I’m never going to quibble with the line that it’s better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable). Call me perverse, but what’s sexy to me in midlife – apart from the thought of Paul Mescal in Gladiator 2 – is a government that does immediate, emergency triage on the NHS, prioritises education and affordable housing, while shoring up our basic infrastructure. This magazine’s favourite expert, the disaster planner Lucy Easthope, has long warned that it’s more a “when” than “if” scenario for the next major train crash or building collapse, because all our safety systems are failing.

In just one more “normal for the UK” scenario, a good friend was admitted to hospital this week with all the signs of a cardiac arrest, the likely reason being a blockage of the arteries. The reason I’m not certain is that, at the time of writing, he’d been in a queue awaiting attention at Britain’s top heart hospital for four days without having an essential echocardiogram, let alone an angiogram. Another man told him he’d been waiting over a week. My friend has a wife and teenage child (his wife told the medics, as part of her desperate pleas to get him seen, that he’s great at ironing and there was a big laundry pile waiting back home) and has paid taxes all his life. This comes hard on the heels of another close mucker going to A&E three times over a fortnight before his “massive” pulmonary embolism was diagnosed, even though he had text-book symptoms (chest pains and shortage of breath). He had to fight tooth and nail for a routine d-dimer test – if you don’t know what that is, look it up, because it could save your life in a similar situation. 

I’d end here, but I’m going to add one more soul-sapping story. My sixteen-year-old son has just finished GCSEs and would usually be throwing himself into the Cam with his friends during a hot spell. Grantchester Meadows is the traditional place to jump in, following the lead set by Lord Byron and Rupert Brooke. But the teens got so ill last year from sewage off-flow into our beautiful chalk-stream river that they’re reluctant to go back. 

The fact is, the UK is sick. Let’s just hope it’s not terminal. I, for one, am going to vote for change. 

The Times ran a story this week about a Ukrainian entrepreneur who’s making and programming AI-operated drones from an office in Kyiv. We were told that the Stanford-educated father of three “has reason to be cheerful” because his creations could give Ukraine “an edge” in its David-and-Goliath war with Russia. The drones are capable of cooperating with each other in a “swarm” of up to seven killer machines. The reporter quoted the inventor as saying, “It’s the equivalent of bringing the steam engine into the factory all those years ago.” This was life turned into science fiction, with lines like: “the first ‘killer robots’ are here.” I’m not so sure about “first”, since it’s my understanding that these new-generation drones (or ones with similar capacity) are already being used elsewhere, including by the Israeli army in Gaza. And while the Times article talked of them being deployed to destroy tanks and snoop on the enemy, it did not dwell on their contingent capacity to mince young soldiers or make pieces of civilians, women and children. 

Much as I support Ukraine’s right to defend itself, this is not – I repeat NOT – “cheerful” news for anyone. Military experts have warned for some time of terrorists across the globe assembling exactly these kinds of devices in their garages, with equal ingenuity. The greatest brains in the UK regularly discuss the horrific potential of killer robots, unguided by human sensibility and conscience, engaging in slaughter. Everyone admits the potential for AI systems to become fully autonomous and deadly. The Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk (CSER) was established to discuss this and numerous other scenarios in which mankind could be wiped from the planet. I watched a clever activist called Taniel Yusef (her many hats include working for the CSER and also on the UK Campaign to Stop Killer Robots) talk with drone expert and ex-soldier Chris Lincoln-Jones at London’s Frontline Club about what we are unleashing on the world. In the week afterwards Lincoln-Jones wrote this piece for Perspective, after I asked him to alert readers to what lies ahead. Except it isn’t “ahead”, it’s already here. I hope Ukraine pushes Putin back, I really, really do. Like most people, I believe the Russian leader is a tyrant. But I also hope the world remembers J Robert Oppenheimer before it rushes to unleash such weapons. As the biopic reminded everyone, Oppenheimer’s legacy with the A-bomb includes these words: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds”.

This historical mystery is based on a true-life “missing persons” case from 1933, when the neatly folded clothes of a man and a woman were found on a clifftop on Sark, smallest of the Channel Islands. The story opens as a group of locals gather in the police cell where the clothes have been laid out. Crop-haired Phyll Carey, daughter of the postmistress, wistfully fingers the woman’s clothing – a tailored jacket and skirt in “beige flecked tweed” and a blouse of “peach silk with a double-edged collar” – a move that unsettles onlookers, because surely it isn’t seemly to eye up a (possibly) dead woman’s apparel.

Full of gentle nuance, Mary Horlock’s novel is narrated by an unidentified woman who’s steeped in generations of Sark lore. As the titular “stranger’s companion”, she guides the reader around the island, with bossy asides (“Let us be clear”) and jaunty pronouncements: “Sark people are very proud of the thickness of their walls. It means a person might be murdered in their kitchen and no one outside would hear.”

Is this a murder case? No one has yet been reported missing, though Sark is popular with day trippers from neighbouring Guernsey (where Australian-born Horlock grew up). But “word has spread. It has also jostled, nudged, skipped and elbowed”, observes our narrator, and national newspapers quickly pick up the story. Phyll starts writing about it herself, and reconnects with a young man called Everard, with whom she seems to share a terrible secret. “We thought we were playing all those years ago,” Everard tells her, “but our games and tricks triggered something, something evil.” 

Stories of ghosts, folklore and hauntings pervade Sark, and several characters in The Stranger’s Companion see visions, usually of distraught women, because this is partly a story of those left behind after war has either killed their men or left them violent from shell shock – including Phyll’s father. Her mother, Elise, has second sight, while Phyll suffers from the marginally lesser evil of being a dreamer (“all that novel-reading as a child didn’t help”). 

This is as enjoyably old-school as a Powell and Pressburger film, with a satisfying vein of feminism. The big romantic clinch feels “as if there’s one heart beating between them”, and is sealed with a kiss to the forehead. It’s a novel to be devoured on a long summer’s day, with a cup of tea and a scone.