A fool and his money
Water to the rescue
Bernard Hollowood
I was once invited to lunch by a whisky baron who believes that only his Glen Denis Malt can bring out the true flavour of the finest Lugosi Russian caviar. Whisky is not really my tipple and I cannot take it neat (as I was apparently expected to) without suffering torment on the underside of my breastbone. So, fully conscious of the social solecism I was committing, I asked for water with which to adulterate the precious amber fluid.
The baron's eyebrows took off and he made a mental adjustment, relating me three or four places in his idea of Britain's social stratigraphy. Then he rose with the silent inevitability of boiling milk and walked over to a wall safe. And from this he extracted a bottle of water.
"Glen McDue water," he said, "is the only water that Glen Denis whisky can tolerate. I have it flown down specially for people like you."
I said that I thought this most considerate.
The caviar, mountains of it, was excellent, rather like heavily-salted sago, and my opinion of the Soviets and their sturgeon improved with every mouthful.
But it was that Glen McDue water that filled my mind as I sauntered back to the office. In Britain we take our tap water for granted. It may be softer on the flanks of the Pennines after percolating through the Millstone Grit, harder in limestone country; it may contain more fluoride here, less there; but it is everywhere drinkable. And we have lashings of the stuff.
Not so elsewhere. In France the chief freight on the railways is bottled water — from Vichy and other reliable spas — and your average Frenchie would no more think of slaking his thirst at the tap than an Englishman would of sitting down to a casserole of frogs' legs. For centuries we have been warned not to drink the water when travelling abroad, and the advice is not necessarily an old wives' tale, which reminds me that Arnold Bennett's last illness was the result of a reckless attack on a carafe of water in a French restaurant. In my time, I have drunk my fill of water in most of the countries of Western Europe without any obvious ill effects, and I have even sampled the agua of
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