CITY AND SUBURBAN
Proposals to cover this column with concrete save champagne, drink with a friend
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
The proposal to pave this column over or to put it down to concrete has received a mixed reception. The suggestion, reaching me from my friends in the water business, is that this would make the column more predictable and easier to maintain. It could appear unchanged from week to week and year to year, unless, of course, it were to crack up. This arrangement would save effort and energy on my part, and would help to ease the pressure of demand on scarce resources, like champagne, which plays its part in the column's cultivation. The shippers could stand their helicopter down. They would not need to maintain an aerial surveillance of my column, so that if I consumed too much of their product, they could prosecute me. Instead I look forward to being sent leaflets with helpful sugges- tions, like 'Save champagne — drink with a friend'. As against this it is argued that a lifeless slab of column, periodically hosed down, may not be quite what the customers want or expect, or even what they thought they were paying for. My watery friends tell me to pay no attention to this. Their cus- tomers do not appreciate the efforts being made for them. They imagine that water falls out of the sky. It was easier in the good old days when everything else was on the ration, too. Now people have come to think that there is no such thing as a scarce resource, only one where an inefficiently operated market has failed to bring buyers and sellers together. They may also think that the water companies, for all their capi- talist trappings, are old-fashioned public water boards at heart, and still believe that they know better than their customers.
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