I HAVE a drink problem. I expect that you have, too. You might not realise it because the amount you are swilling back each day has come to seem normal and everyone else is doing it. But look at yourself. How much are you on? Three, four pints a day? And I bet you’re gradually increasing your intake. I know I am. I have my first drink as soon as I wake up and my last before I switch out the light at night. And I’m swigging all day. Not just socially but in the office as well. Sip, sip, sip. I just don’t care. I keep a bottle of the stuff on my desk. Brazen as anything.
Water, water, everywhere. Nor any drop unbottled. But how did it come to this? Ten years ago nobody drank water. OK, so you might have had a glass if you were very thirsty or if it was a particularly hot day or you’d just come staggering out of the Sahara Desert or something. But you’d have been much more likely to have a cup of tea or a glass of Robinson’s barley water. Mineral water came only in heavy glass bottles and was for the health fanatics or Blairites who wanted to show how ascetic and serious they were. Now, we have all become obsessed by the need to get our anti-ageing, detoxing, rehydrating fix of H20. Commuters hug their little plastic bottles like security blankets, embarking on Tube journeys as if they were about to set off across Death Valley in high summer. In the office the queues at the water cooler are longer than for Madame Tussauds. A “watercooler conversation” used to be a brief interlude in the working day in which people tried to recall the best lines from the previous night’s episode of The Office. Now the working day seems to be mostly water-cooler conversation with the occasional brief burst of work before returning to the queue or going to the toilet.
The toilet bit is the worst. I’m never out of there. At school we were told, “The more you put in, the more you get out”. Never has that been so vividly demonstrated as it is now. I’ve been in the office two hours this morning and I’ve already been to the toilet three times. And I always seem to see the same people. We joke nervously about following each other in there all the time. I hope they are fellow water fetishists. Otherwise, they may have the wrong idea about me.
It’s not easy to drink water properly. Are you drinking enough? I used to be under the impression that 1.5 litres was just right. But then the received wisdom seemed to be that you needed two litres. Then last week Jane Clarke, The Times nutritionist, dropped a bombshell: it should be 2.5 litres. That could include a couple of cups of tea, she conceded. But I take it that a Diet Coke doesn’t count and just adds another toilet trip.
It’s enough to drive you to (alcoholic) drink. But of course, that is the most disastrous thing you can imbibe. I woke up this morning with a slight hangover, having failed last night to keep to my strategy of drinking a matching glass of water for every glass of wine. So I sluiced down three quarters of a litre so that I could try to rehydrate before the day had even begun. Now I’m attempting to drink my 2.5 litres on top of that. And I’m off to lunch with someone I know will insist on a couple of glasses of vino . . .
(Later) I had three glasses of wine and a couple of glasses of water. The mouth still feels furry. So I’ll just have another 50cl of water. That’s better. Except that I feel as if I have drunk my own body weight in liquid. And I still have a litre of my daily dose to go.
Better not go to the gym tonight. My instructor told me we need to replace what we have sweated off, and that means downing 1 or 2 litres on top of your basic 2.5.
Drinking water is part of the modern holy trinity of wellbeing, along with consuming five portions of fruit or veg a day and taking regular cardiovascular exercise. I’m fine with the fruit and veg (so long as I knock off a couple of portions at breakfast. Otherwise, you’re playing desperate catch-up all day.) As for exercise, I manage a couple of gym trips and two or three 40-minute walks home from work. Which is fine, except when you try to do that and keep up with the water. I’ve thought about moving my desk right next to the water cooler. Or changing the occupation on my passport from “journalist” to “water addict”.
I fear that the recommended water intake will keep on being raised until we will be drawing baths so we can slurp them dry. We’ll be lugging our own supplies of the stuff around in barrels on trollies, or hitching them to dray horses. Fire hydrants will have to be opened up to public use and officers taken off firefighting duties to ensure orderly queues and prevent the unscrupulous from drinking more than their allotted gallonage. Raiding parties will head down to the Antarctic to purloin loose chunks of the ice shelf and melt them down.
Do I feel better? I’m not sure. I certainly feel bloated. And the more water I drink, the thirstier I seem to be. Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me. This column-writing is getting in the way of my water-drinking. And I can see a hellish queue forming over by the water cooler.
Save the Woodies
IN MY YOUTH I was a member of the Woodcraft Folk. This is not something I let slip in conversation too often. As a kid I found the name embarrassing, and it still seems pretty silly. But now that the Government has announced that it is ending its annual £52,000 grant to this co-ed alternative to the Scouts and Guides, threatening its existence, I feel compelled to leap to the defence.
Most people think that the Woodcraft Folk are a strange band of hippyish creatures who wear funny green shirts and dance about in copses at dead of night chanting strange incantations such as “I will grow strong and straight like the pine, supple of limb like the hare, keen of eye like the eagle”.
And they would be right. But for the most part the organisation, founded by idealists in the 1920s, is a good thing. The suspicion is that the Government has axed the funding because the Woodcraft Folk opposed the Iraq war.
I am a little uneasy about the political side of the group’s work. When I look back I realise that at a highly impressionable age I was off on demonstrations against bombs and wars of which I knew very little, in the company of earnest adults who had only a slightly less rudimentary grasp of the issues.
But such activism is a tiny part of the organisation’s activities. Through the Woodcraft Folk generations of children, led by adult volunteers, have escaped cities to camp and explore wild and beautiful corners of our islands. To lose that, for the sake of a measly £52,000, seems harsh. The Government claims that the organisation does not offer “value for money”. But the whole thing smells. The paradox is that when I was a member, it was Tory councils who were flinging us out of school halls for being supposedly too left-wing. It was mean-spirited, petty politics then and it is now.
Pee-pil, please!
WHICH IS MOST damaging to Michael Howard: the row over his sacking of the MP Michael Flight or the comments from John Redwood’s former wife, Gail, who claims that the shadow Deregulation Secretary constantly mocked Howard for his weird pronunciation — “pee-pil”? Probably the latter. The image of the Vulcan doing impersonations of Dracula does little to help the Tories to shake their image as a party with more than its fair share of fruit loops.
damian.whitworth@thetimes.co.uk
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