I’ve been visiting an old friend, having the kinds of conversations you can have with someone you trust to share most of your prejudices and assumptions. It makes me feel old in the best possible way, being able to refer cheerfully to ideas objectionable to the young, though my friend’s daughter was around to argue for Gen Z.
My friend – we’ll call her Mary – and I were trading stories about trying to get family groups out of the house on time. When I say 9.30, I said, I mean 9.30, I mean you should have your shoes and coat on and be at the door with your phone and your keys and whatever accoutrements you consider necessary for the outing, not that this is the moment to start looking for your wallet and refilling your absurd water bottle and deciding that you cannot be seen in public in this particular black top.
I’ve often thought, I said, once you’ve got four or more people out of the house at the same time it’s an anticlimax to go to the cinema; you might as well go on holiday. Or emigrate. (This kind of thinking has led to an interesting life.)
Everyone needs water, said Mary’s daughter. Not all the time, I said; mammals have survived varying times and distances from water sources since they first crawled out of the sea. When I were a lass, I said, settling into a recent and enjoyable grumpy old woman persona, no one carried water unless we were going hiking for more than a couple of hours, and even then it was mostly as part of the emergency back-up kit. I remember, I said, when bottles of water were first sold in shops, we thought it was ridiculous and only idiots would pay for something running freely from every tap.
You must have all been very dehydrated, Mary’s daughter said primly. When we were thirsty, I said even more primly, we had a drink when we were next in a place with a water supply. We didn’t imagine we’d evolved not to notice thirst any more than we thought we might not know when it was time to eat or breathe or go to the loo.
[ How much water do you need to drink every day?Opens in new window ]
I was being provocative, of course, and we were both enjoying the generational parody. But it’s true that I rarely carry water, preferring to use the bag space for an extra book in case I finish the first one. I’ve never measured how much water I drink, but even though I run a lot it’s nowhere near the two litres bandied about. I cannot imagine how this could be any kind of failing. My bodily systems seem to run just fine.
I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong to carry water or not, or to drink however much makes you feel good in mind and body. Harmless, either way (as long as you fill your bottle before the stated hour of departure).
But I wonder, were many people always thirsty, in the millenniums before water bottles? In much of Europe for most of the last few centuries, especially in towns and cities, it wasn’t safe to drink water at all and most people, including children, drank “small beer” or watered wine. (I’m no brewer, but from reading medieval cookbooks I think the “small beer” might have been more like kombucha than anything on which it would be practical to get drunk.)
Most people also ate a lot of soups and gruels and sometimes drank herbal tisanes and life was generally nastier, more brutish and shorter than most of us now expect, but even so the constant water-drinking habit is recent in the long view of history as well as between generations.
I suppose my (in)conclusion, predictably, is that history and bodies are complicated and their relationships nuanced. People were well and unwell in different ways in different times and places; many practices that felt healthful in earlier centuries and decades now seem harmful, and vice versa. (One of my favourite gleanings from those medieval cookbooks was a recipe for toothpaste involving sugar, ground almonds and rosewater to perfume the breath.)
But I am still not going to drink water unless I feel thirsty, and I am certainly not going to displace the knitting and notebook in my bag with a heavy bottle. I’d rather risk thirsty reading than hydrated tedium.