Oh, the modesty of the Swedes. A few weeks into my campaign for table-water sustainability I found myself at Upper Glas (a glorious pun celebrating the removal of the Swedish restaurant Glas from Borough Market to the site of what used to be Lola’s on Upper Street) and demanding, as ever, to know what kind of bottled water they had.

“It’s just normal water,” said the chap, in a very polite, Swedish way that sought merely to convey apparently obvious information without suggesting, as a Frenchman will always endeavour to do in such a situation, that I was some sort of halfwit.

Now, obviously, it’s just normal water. All water is just normal water. Which is exactly why I want you, my flock, to stop paying through the snout for it merely because it has been dragged from some Peruvian mountain top for the sheer hell of desecrating virgin forest, warming the planet, and making some fat toad of a packaging entrepreneur rich enough to shag women who find him, privately, revolting.

The admission that it is “just normal water” is exactly the admission I want every waiter in the land to make, before adding, “which is why we suggest you have a lovely cool glass of completely free tap water, sir.”

Here, no doubt, in this newly installed Swedish restaurant in Islington, the water would be called Fnøør Xtra Kööl and have been “sourced from a borehole (dug with an elk antler) deep in ancient glacier fields whose soothing H2O has been purified over millions of years in the icy cool mountain streams of ancient, old, clean Sweden where Abba came from, who were famously pure and clean,” and I would have to object on all sorts of grounds of sustainability, modesty, price and taste.

But the thing was, I had cycled from Kentish Town – not far, but I had made the journey muffled up against a bright, frosty noontime and was more than somewhat parched inside my steaming layers of clobber – and was in no mood for blarney. So I just told him to bring me a bottle of the wettest stuff he had, and prepared to rail at him and all his kind when it arrived.

But when it arrived, it was Belu. Sainted Belu.

“Normal water?” I cried aloud, in such a way as would have very much disturbed the peace of the other diners, had there been any other diners in the large, sunlit, first- floor dining room with its parquet floors and brightly coloured floral fabrics and wooden tables half-covered with quaint dishclothy type things and gorgeous views down bustling Upper Street. Well, apart from a couple sitting at the big table in the window, which was always the best table in the house in the old Lola’s days, and still is, and is even, perhaps, the best table in N1 – and I did not mind disturbing them, for I rather resented their nabbing of said table.

“Normal water?” I cried again, lest the people at the good table hadn’t heard. “This is not normal water, this is Belu, the non-profit-making water, sourced and bottled in Shropshire, with a carbon footprint smaller than a mouse on points, and bottled in a fully degradable, corn-derived plastic which can be composted back to soil in 12 weeks, all of whose profits go to fund drinking water projects in India and Africa and river-cleaning projects in Britain.”

“I see,” said the Swede.

“I hope you do,” I said. “The thing is, if people do ask what kind of water you have, you are in the luxurious position of not having to mutter a sheepish ‘Fiji’ or ‘Voss’, but of being able to say, ‘We serve Belu, sir, the non-profit-making water, sourced and bottled in etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…’ and that is an answer which will go down extremely well in Islington, if I know anything about Islington.”

“Well, that is very interesting,” said the Swede, “I will do that in future.” And off he toddled, no doubt to look for a job in a bank or a school, or perhaps even start a pop group. Anything to get out of catering, and the regular interfacing with punters who are slightly touched in the head.

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