How losing your bottle can save your sanity

I am, and I can hardly believe it, talking about different varieties of bottled water: more specifically, the 30 brands on Claridges' new "water list," unveiled last week with much piping of marketing trumpets.

When we're all living up trees as the rising oceans finally overwhelm us, or huddled in our caves over the nuclear winter, we'll look back on Claridges' water list as the Kilimanjaro of London's decadence and hubris, the point at which we secretly knew we deserved our fate.

The supply of clean, fresh water to every home in the land is one of the great triumphs of the modern age. It has probably saved more human lives than any other technological advance in our history. It is one of the things that mark our good fortune in a world where millions still struggle to get water. And it is virtually free.

So why do you think some of us are prepared to pay up to £50 a litre (a mere five million per cent markup over Chateau Thames Tap) for a bottle of "420 Volcanic," shipped 12,000 miles from New Zealand?

Not, I think, for the taste. In blind tests carried out by a newspaper, one supposed expert described his glass of water as having a "fresh, sweet, lemony aroma." It was, in fact, tap water from a Birmingham public toilet. If you put a bottle of tap in the fridge for 24 hours, you, too, can savour the taste of Badoit.

Not for the benefits it brings. Even, say, 4x4s have some purpose: they carry more people than a normal car, and are more stable on the road. But bottled water has grown from nothing and for no reason whatever except human pretentiousness.

Thirty years ago, it was unheard of to buy water in a British supermarket, and almost unheard of in a restaurant. Now it's an incredibly damaging, two-billion-litre a year industry consuming untold quantities of plastic, packaging, and fuel for the lorries which truck it to the supermarkets.

It's the ultimate example of unnecessary consumption, something we didn't even know we wanted until the marketing men sold it to us. It's a sign of decline in our public realm: the £1.20 bottles of Evian where there used to be drinking fountains. And in every middleclass-home, the presence of the water bottle is a sign that, for all our eco-righteousness, we're still going backwards.

Claridges' Renaud Gregoire tells us that "water is becoming like wine. Every guest has an opinion, and asks for a particular brand."

The opinion of this "guest" is that anyone who orders bottled water shows themselves to be a very particular brand of idiot.