Monday 19 June 2023: Tapwater

Monday 19 June 2023: Tap-water

I rarely drink tap-water neat. As it happens, I did so at about 04:15 this morning when I woke, ostensibly to answer the call of nature. This was my first time, drinking plain water drawn from the tap, possibly in a year. The issue is less about taste: I do not enjoy the mouthfeel of water that has not been carbonated. Tap water feels kind of greasy in my mouth, and consequently mildly unpleasant. The same applies to water from drinking water fountains. (Water in countryside streams even feels greasy to my touch.) Moreover, I do not experience uncarbonated water as quenching of my thirst. In contrast, fresh (as distinct from stale) carbonated water both quenches my thirst and does not have a greasy mouthfeel. I read, probably in some informal publication, four or five decades ago, that thirst quenching is about stimulating the saliva glands and then removing the saliva from the mouth (probably by swallowing the saliva-laced drink). I neither know the truth of this assertion, nor have I been able to corroborate it. However, if true, then it makes some kind of sense that flavoured water, such as fruit juice, a herb tisane, a barley drink, beer or wine would stimulate my saliva glands with their flavour.

I drank some carbonated bottled water last week. The weather was quite warm, and I had been outside in the vegetable garden all afternoon trying to clear a prospective plant bed of rank, shoulder high weeds. I felt hot, sweaty and thirsty. I drank half a glass of cold carbonated water from the fridge and it slaked my immediate thirst. Frequently, however, I run the risk of mild dehydration, and either I forget to drink or, if I am away from home, I avoid drinking so as to avoid the need to find and use a toilet. Ever since I discovered that caffeine (in tea, coffee and hot chocolate) was significantly elevating my blood pressure for stretches of several days at a time, I have had to eschew these drinks - sadly, including their decaffeinated versions, although I have no understanding of why this latter should be the case. (Please, someone, give me an injection to neutralise the hypertensive effect of caffeine, so that I can return to Monsoon Malabar double-espressi, to cups of my cherished Assam and Darjeeling blend, and to mugs of thick, steaming hot chocolate.) The weather being warm, I thought that I ought to drink some more, but I could not face drinking more water neat, carbonated or not, so into the next glass I poured a serving of our own home-made elderflower cordial (there are many elder bushes around the garden and orchard), and then filled the glass with the cold, carbonated water. That was a most pleasant drink.

I am ideologically uneasy about bottled water, partly because the industry uses mountains of plastic (which ends up accreting in enormous garbage patches swirling around the world's oceans), partly because transporting bottled water has a heavy CO2 footprint, and partly because the sale of bottled water is about spivs making enormous amounts of money (in 2021, the UK bottled water market was worth £1.64 billion) out of a commodity that people can simply draw from the kitchen tap. The foregoing notwithstanding, I have written before about having a strong preference for San Pellegrino bottled water. I do actually like the taste of it, and on a hot day (preferably somewhere in France or Italy) I should be happy to drink San Pellegrino bottled water all day until it was time to switch over to drinking wine for the evening. San Pellegrino is heavily mineralised (very hard), giving the water its flavour. As far as I am able to tell, it is the dissolved carbonates and bicarbonates of calcium and magnesium, as well as the absence of nitrates, that give San Pellegrino water its distinctive taste.

I have visited  Rome only once, twenty-five years ago. As well as the spectacular fountains, such as the Fontana di Trevi, and the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona, there are countless everyday public drinking fountains around the centro storico. The freely available water in these drinking fountains is considered to be high quality spring water, and hygienic having passed through a water treatment plant. One evening, I was dining in a pizzeria, and was asked what I wished to order to drink: "Acqua frizzante o acqua minerale?" The bottled water on the menu (ironically, it seems that San Pellegrino is not very popular in Italy) was more expensive than the vino da tavola, so I opted for the acqua minerale. The waiter took the empty water jug from the table, popped out of the restaurant to the public drinking fountain on the corner of the street, filled the water jug, and brought it back to my table. The memory still makes me chuckle.