The sickness started in the early hours of the morning, after returning from a long day at the beach.

It had been one of those magical summer days where the sun glittered on the sea and the heat had, for a moment, made Cornwall feel like Corfu (if you ignored the seagulls dive-bombing tourists for their ice creams).

My best friend and I had travelled down to the Roseland Peninsula with our children and we’d been taking full advantage of the weather, spending most of the time at various beaches on the south coast.

We’d visited St Mawes, a gorgeous harbour town featuring stone beaches with pontoons that the children love jumping off. It was from one of these pontoons that my daughter and I decided to swim across the bay to the harbour and back, a journey of just over half a kilometre that we figured would set us up for a deep sleep that night.

The water was mostly a gorgeous blue until we got to the harbour area, where it appeared a little bit murkier. I assumed this was to do with all the boats nearby, not to mention the ferry that chugs back and forth to Falmouth all day. We have spent many a happy hour swimming here without any problems whatsoever, so I thought nothing of it.

That evening, we arrived back at our Airbnb with salty hair and sun-kissed noses, and for a while all was well. But just before 5am, my daughter and I both woke up feeling distinctly queasy.

I shan’t go into too many details but let’s just say that I’m glad there was more than one bathroom in the lodge we were staying in. Sick to the stomach is the phrase that springs to mind, unfortunately.

Thankfully, my best friend and her children were fine. Perhaps Edie and I had snacked on some dodgy fudge? Maybe we’d brought something with us from London? It was only while lying in bed trying to recover that I stumbled across an article on a local Cornish news site, detailing the sewage spill that had taken place in St Mawes harbour just a couple of days before.

The harbour in St Mawes, Cornwall, where a burst pipe recently pumped raw sewage into the water

My stomach turned again as I read that, just five days earlier, a burst pipe in the village car park had ended up pumping raw sewage into the harbour for ‘approximately two to five hours’ in the middle of the night.

The Environment Agency had apparently put up signs warning people not to enter the water for 48 hours but as we were outside that time frame they’d clearly been taken down.

Indeed, it was only when my friend returned the next day to get something from the pharmacy for us that she saw a notice tacked to some railings, saying the spillage had been dealt with – South West Water had apparently sent a tanker to remove it – but people entered the water at their own risk.

Surfers Against Sewage has an incredible app which lets people know when there’s a water quality alert. But it’s a charity and not every beach is covered – less heavily used ones such as those in St Mawes aren’t – so this particular spill hadn’t shown up.

The app reveals, though, that it’s far from the only place in Cornwall that has experienced sewage overflow recently. South West Water had discharged sewage at Readymoney Cove – a popular beach for families in Fowey – while the Environment Agency had issued a pollution warning for the beach overlooking St Michael’s Mount. Meanwhile in Falmouth, just opposite the aptly named town of Flushing, sewage was spilled for almost an hour in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Locals are furious but nothing seems to change. A friend who lives in Fowey tells me it gets worse each year and she’s taken to drinking a can of Coke after every swim in the hope that it will kill anything nasty she accidentally swallows.

You might reasonably expect to get sick when travelling somewhere exotic – but Cornwall? My daughter and I were lucky our symptoms passed after 24 hours but we should never have had them in the first place.

There are laws, of course, to stop this kind of thing from happening. It’s illegal to discharge sewage into rivers and coastal waters unless the system has been overwhelmed, usually by storms and heavy rainfall.

But South West Water, which covers Devon and Cornwall, has a hosepipe ban in place due to drought conditions, so one wonders what, exactly, its excuse is for these recent discharges.

This week, Andy Burnham said he would block water companies from introducing ‘surge pricing’ during periods of drought. And one of his first acts as Prime Minister was to tell these ghastly, greedy, mismanaged firms that he was angry at them for treating customers as a ‘bottomless source of funding’.

It’s bad enough knowing companies are profiting from us after years of failings. But poisoning us, as well? It’s time the tide turned for good on these dirty, disgusting water companies.

Hats off to Madonna for her heatwave holidaywear

Madonna celebrated her 68th birthday this week by taking over the tiny village of Kouramades in Corfu, setting for TV series The Durrells. What must its 180 residents have thought as she danced the night away with her children and 30-year-old boyfriend? I imagine, like the rest of us, they were admiring her ornate, long-sleeved Dolce & Gabbana dress – and wondering how the hell she managed to wear it in Greece in mid August!

Karen’s words will strike a chord

Well done to Karen Mulder for giving such a powerful interview to German Vogue about her time as a supermodel in the 1990s. Mulder was one of the first people to blow the whistle about the abuses in the modelling industry and was branded crazy for it. ‘All I wanted was for those terrible things to stop – for men to stop thinking they could do whatever they pleased,’ she told the magazine. It’s a heartbreaking quote that will resonate with so many women who were working in the 90s – regardless of the industry they happened to be in.

Time to ban speakers on phones!

Well done to Wetherspoons for banning customers from using speaker mode on their phones. From now on, people will have to use earphones or switch to silent.

Can this be rolled out to the rest of the world? I’m not a natural pubgoer, given that I don’t drink, but a place where I don’t have to listen to tinny interruptions from the phones of strangers sounds like absolute heaven to me.

American Vogue has created a special edition called Dogue featuring celebrity canines in all their splendour. My favourite has to be the shot of pop star Bad Bunny enjoying a Lady And The Tramp-style spaghetti dinner with his beagle, Sansa. It’s the first time I’ve ever wanted to be reincarnated as a dog.

According to a new study in Finland, the quality of sleep in midlife can predict the longevity of your career.

People who slept for longer tended to have long working lives, while those who experienced disturbances every night tended to be out of work earlier.

Interestingly, the study definition of a ‘short’ sleep duration was under seven hours – which suggests that I and the other exhausted midlifers I know are speeding towards the exit when it comes to our careers.