Fluid consumption habits

One thing I hear repeatedly when I go to the Anglo-Saxon world is criticism of people who drink bottled water.  Stupid people like to comment on how in drinking bottled water, we are consuming at great expense something we could get for free from the tap.  To me, this shows a tremendous amount of ignorance.

I could never drink tap water.  Ever.  For the simple reason that it is not pure enough.  I hope I would never find myself in that situation, but if I were in a desert dying of thirst, I would be highly tempted to decline tap water, even if it meant death, but then who knows?  Even salt water can taste delicious in a desert.  For this reason, when I travel to hot countries, I carry with me some means of filtering the water so that the disgusting nature of tap water is mitigated.  To me, tap water is only for washing and not for drinking.

When it comes to what I will condescend to drink, at the very least, I will not settle for anything less than the quality of the French brand Volvic.  Volvic is by no means a top brand, given its ubiquity, even in the UK, where bourgeois bohemians often drink it, mistakenly thinking it is a top brand.  Ha!  What ignorance!

Ignorant people say that the only real difference between water types around the world is the isotopes, which indicate where people were from to archaeologists many years later.  Well, I've got news for such people: - a French woman's palate is so sophisticated that it can tell the difference between isotopes.  How do we do that?  Hard to say.  I guess it is part of how we are so effortlessly perfect.

Another brand of water I love to drink, even though it isn't French, is Fiji Water.  I feel privileged to be sophisticated enough to be able to drink all these different types of water and know where they are all from.

Another brand of water I love to drink is San Pellegrino.  Though it is not French either, it is a sophisticated Italian brand that comes from San Pellegrino Terme, near Bergamo in Italy.  It was briefly mentioned by the Aga Saga Woman in The Catherine Tate Show, a British comedy show (one of the few things British people do better than us French).  The Aga Saga Woman is portrayed as a snobbish woman, but as far as I'm concerned, her tastes are actually very lower class compared to those of sophisticated French women.

Now, when choosing mineral waters, one must be careful, as not all bottled water is drinkable.  There was one occasion when I was in the UK on business and my incompetent bank activated the policy I have for automatically cancelling all my cards when one's wallet gets stolen.  What happened was that a woman with a similar name called to have her cards cancelled, meaning that none of my cards worked.  The most horrific thing was that I had to live on the £200 cash I had before going back to France the following day, where I was able to get the matter sorted out with my bank.  As a result, I condescended to go into a branch of Tesco when I became thirsty.  YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was one of the most horrific experiences of my life and it left me deeply traumatised for months afterwards.  Anyway, one of the things that mitigated the experience was finding bottles of Volvic and San Pellegrino available.  However, there were bottles of low-quality water, in particular things like Buxton Water and own-brand stuff from Scotland.  Yuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Look at the photo above with the overweight women collecting water from some sort of spring water fountain in Buxton, Derbyshire.  If they drank proper water like us French women, they would not get like this.  The only brand of mineral water bottled in Britain I would ever consider condescending to drink in Britain.  The reason is that Glastonbury is somewhere near Bath, which is the site of Britain's only thermal spa.  The photo below shows the reservoir from which Glastonbury Spring Water is collected.  As far as I am aware from the company's website, the water is only sold on a trade basis, but maybe that is a mark of its exclusivity?  If I were to start a British version of my magazine and I didn't want to create controversy by importing foreign water loaded with air miles (some people are ignorant, but alas, in the world of business, you sometimes have to do things to generate public goodwill), I would probably choose them as the supplier of bottled water for my office.

However, those wanting to be like us sophisticated French women, all I can say is beware!  Not all bottled water on sale is high quality and anyone who thinks so needs to do further work to refine their palate.