One day recently, when my daughter arrived to collect her small boy from our house, she asked me if I had an old towel she could use to mop up close on two litres of water which was sloshing about in the footwell of the front passenger seat of her car. On a routine basis she carries around with her a huge quantity of water in a fancy drinking bottle. On the day in question her husband had filled up her water bottle for her and popped it into the car as she loaded up children to take them to school or to my house before going on to work. At some point in her journey she heard the huge bottle fall over with a clunk but thought nothing of it. What she didn’t know was that her helpful husband had failed to fasten the bottle securely. The normally watertight fastening was slowly letting water glug out into the footwell. By the time she arrived at work and reached for it, the bottle was almost empty. Fortunately the bag carrying her laptop was waterproof!!
Which brings me to the modern obsession with water bottles. I confess that I too have a rather pleasing water bottle. It doesn’t hold anything like two litres of water. I take it out with me if I am going on a long walk in warm weather and know that I will not be passing anywhere selling refreshments of any kind. Very often it comes home full. It does not accompany me on shopping trips. But my daughter, and all her offspring, have a bottle of water to hand at all times. Well, the little chap doesn’t bring one to my house because he has his own drink cup here. I am, however, reminded to ensure that he drinks plenty of water. My daughter has her huge bottle in her classroom and all her little charges all have their bottles of water in the classroom. Granddaughter Number Four has a water bottle emblazoned with the name of her primary school. The school sells them to parents of reception class children.
I stop and wonder how I managed to go a whole morning teaching my A-level classes, sometimes without a break as back to back classes meant I taught from 9.00 to 12.00, without drinking copious amounts of water, or indeed any water at all! Indeed, I wonder how I managed to get through my own education without stopping to have drinks in the middle of lessons.
I am not alone in wondering about this. Emma Brockes, in her Digested Week in today’s Guardian, asks:
“Do you carry a water bottle to work? Do you send your kid with one to school? The obsession with hydration is decades deep, but still too shallow to reach back to my school days. I sometimes freak my children out by telling them entire days would go by when I didn’t drink water and no one thought anything of it. By contrast these people are constantly chugging and running off to the loo.”
She goes on:
“As it turns out, what an Australian psychologist has termed “emotional support water bottles” might not represent the straightforward advance in human wellness we assume. Associate Prof Keong Yap of the Australian Catholic University made his comments about bottles-as-security-blankets to the New York Post in response to a recent US study that found reusable water bottles can contain 40,000 times more germs than the average toilet seat and twice as many as the kitchen sink. More-germs-than-the-toilet is a hardy PR formulation and it should be noted that the study was funded by a water filter company.”
Now, that is quite disgusting!
I have also read recently that the modern obsession with drinking two litres of unadulterated water every day is erroneous. Much of the two litres can be from cups of tea or coffee, from fruit juices and indeed from fruit itself. And really it’s mostly the very young and the very old we need to worry about getting dehydrated, and that mostly in very hot weather.
My inner cynic suspects that it was originally a plot by bottle water companies to make us all buy more. And then, as we have all become aware of the problem of plastic bottles all over the place, re-useable water-bottle manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon. Having a really “nice” water-bottle is rather like having a really “nice” set of leotards for your aerobics class back in the 1970s and 1980s or the latest trend in running gear nowadays.
There you go.
I don’t watch The Antiques Road Show. On the odd occasion that I have accidentally seen it - in the background in a pub or at someone else’s home - I am amazed at the stuff people find in their homes to bring along to be assessed. Sometimes they are large items that require quite complicated transportation. How disappointing it must be to go to all that trouble only to discover that your “treasure” has only sentimental value. However, occasionally it comes good, like the detectorists who eventually find a treasure trove after years of finding no more than old bottle tops. So here’s a link to a story of someone who took along an old painting that had been in the family for decades and discovered that he had a David Hockney on his hands, worth between £20,000 and £30,000!
I don’t think we have anything like that hidden in our attic, just the odd bit of our children’s and grandchildren’s art work.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.
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