I manage utility services - among other things - for a group of properties - and have had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination at various times. The results have always been absolutely fine. Not just with EU limits, but far, far, far within them for almost everything and definitely well within them for all measures.
I’ve got no issues at all with drinking tap water in the UK, even given the state of the rivers etc.
The single biggest thing for me is having a range of knowledgeable and intelligent friends and spending time with them. It very soon puts things in perspective.
The first I thought of was Dead Horse, Alaska. Permanent population 25 - 50, I understand.
I really can’t recall where I first heard of it though.
I have probably heard of a few other odd ones like this.
The original type of coat that would have been worn when riding was the Great Coat - which did cover the whole body, down to the ankles (and included the front of the body much better than a cloak). Those would have been worn by military officers, particularly.
Those were fine for riding, but then if you were off your horse and end up in the newly developed trench warfare - starting from around the US civil war onwards - you ended up wading through mud which got caked to the coat. So then they started cutting the coats shorter and they became Trench Coats.
The actual reason that we don’t is pretty much because of the invention of sewing machines. Once sewing machines were widespread, making coats became sooo much cheaper than they had been. Coats need a lot of tightly made seams which took time and so made coats very expensive. With sewing machines, making these seams was vastly quicker and more reliable.
Coats win over cloaks in so many ways because you can do things with your arms without exposing them or your torso to the rain and cold: impossible with a cloak.
Capes were the short versions - and intended to cover the shoulder and back without seams that might let the rain in, but with the new machine made seams, they were not needed either.
The really big change was when it became affordable to outfit armies with coats instead of cloaks or capes. At that point all the caché and prestige that was associated with military rank disappeared from cloaks and capes and they were suddenly neither useful not fashionable.
Nowadays, of course, they are no longer what your unfashionable dad would have worn: they are quite old enough to have regained a certain style.
In my case, I approached our usual plumbing contractor who have a couple of labs that they usually used. I now go directly to those labs.