WATER. Clean, potable, boring water. Is it really everything it’s made out to be, or is it an optional luxury we don’t honestly need?
Many cultures live perfectly happily without it, such as the Kalahari bushmen and Mexican kangaroo rats. Have we Britons got swept up by the ‘water’ fad without questioning it?
Sure, water can be useful in certain circumstances. But it’s as easy to fill a bath with fizzy drinks or make a cup of tea with boiling lager. And do men really need a hosepipe to wash their cars when they have one right there in their trousers?
A water-free life can be hugely rewarding, our customers are discovering. Lugging heavy packs of bottled water back from the supermarket is such great exercise they’re already telling us to keep not investing in infrastructure when the water comes back on!
‘But don’t you die without water?’ some of you may be thinking because you’ve listened to Big Science. The same Big Science that said smoking and Thalidomide were good for you. Are we really 60 per cent water as they claim? Of course not – you’d be like a garden sprinkler every time you cut yourself!
We should expect less of our water companies. Just because we’re called South East Water doesn’t mean we supply water to the South East. That’s a secondary function after servicing our debts and managing a complex structure of intra-company loans.
And let’s not forget all the other things water companies do, such as spending a fortune on TV adverts with slogans like ‘Quality. On tap’, for reasons opaque to everybody.
But the biggest disadvantage of water is that’s it’s dangerous. Where do sharks live? Water. What happens when it freezes and forms a massive icicle that impales you through the heart? Instant death. And you can drown in a puddle.
So let’s get a grip on our obsession with water and start looking at sustainable alternatives, such as sucking the moisture out of cacti and frogs. While still paying water bills and lobbying Ofwat for them to be higher.
