Theodore Dalrymple observes how students appear to walk around rainy Manchester in constant need fear of dehydration:
A fair proportion of the students carried a plastic bottle, complete with something uncommonly like a dummy's teat, as if global warming had transformed the road into the Sahara Desert.
That water bottle is a fashion accessory, and a very silly one. From The Telegraph leader:
On a train, at a concert, even in church, people habitually drink from bottles of water or suck from those fitted with a teat arrangement. No one wishes them to become dehydrated, but this is very strange behaviour.
It is a mirror image of being prohibited from smoking indoors, even in pubs or private clubs. As carrying a bottle and glugging from it at intervals is voluntary, it is all the more baffling. Do the swiggers think they will wither and fall like leaves to the ground, if they wait a few minutes?
Today, as we report, a doctor in a learned journal calls the advice to drink eight glasses of water a day “nonsense”. That is not how manufacturers of bottled water see it.
Yet, by and large, tapwater in Britain tastes good, and it is certainly clean. When food has gone up by 12 per cent in a year, we might satisfy our thirst doubly from the cheap and private kitchen tap.
What are those teat things for? If you want to have a proper drink you have to take the whole wretched thing off, otherwise you have to suck as you would when being breast-fed – or so I imagine, because that was a long time ago.
Bottled water is absurd, unless it is sparking water, in which case the bubbles add value. Bottled still water is no better for you than tap water. If you live in London or other hard water areas, you can buy a water filter to get rid of the chalky taste and fill up the same bottle. You will be saving money, which can be put towards a decent bottle of wine. Talking of which, those plastic water bottles have their uses, as long as you buy only one or two and re-use them. When you go to the theatre, instead of paying £5 for a glass of very mediocre wine at the interval, take a plastic bottle with a better wine, and more of it, bought for a fraction of the price. Nobody will notice, and if they do, who cares?
On a wildly different note, Nabokov fans will know that the name “Dalrymple” appears somewhere near the climax of Lolita, not long after the word “jaunty”, which was also mentioned at this site. “Jaunty” comes more than a hundred pages after “genteel”, which is how it should be, and is next to, or near, a rather miserable word, “disconsolate” or something. This cannot be a coincidence. Nabokov's Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble later appears in the names of several characters in double-entendreful radio comedy show Round the Horne, and is a lot funnier than those muffin jokes in Speak, Memory.
.jpg)
%20(2).jpg)
.jpg)
