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Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic by Tim Smedley.

During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50 metre Lido.

With my ineligently slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool's opulent chlorine clean 5.9 million litres of water.

Sometimes I swim while it's raining when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with a strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me.

I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane to drink from halfway through my swim.

I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I've showered that morning.

I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence.

But, as I discovered, this won't last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.

Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way.

It will have to stop, not through some altruistic, hand-wringing desire to do better.

But because even in England, this amount of water will soon be unavailable.

Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply.

A surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits.

It's simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.

Little old England manages to encompass many global water problems.

Scarsity, over-obstraction, pollution, under-investment, government and regulatory failings, environmental degradation and corporate misconduct.

All within the confines of one small country in the far west of Europe.

The UK's average annual rainfall is about 1,100 mm, compared with less than 300 mm in Pakistan or double figures in Egypt.

However, despite our winter storms, significant parts of the UK are staring down the barrel of empty water butts.

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