Weirdly, I’ve written the word water for the title of this piece in my drafts, and it just looks wrong. I suddenly cannot read properly, or perhaps spell properly – ??
I’m clearly overthinking again. Always on the lookout for something to worry about, but still, this is – momentarily, at least – more than a little disconcerting.
And has almost made me forget why I wrote the title in the first place… the perils of age!
But yes, I remember now. ‘Water, water…’ is a reference to a new regime upon which I have embarked recently as a further initiative to reduce headaches. I’ve been advised to increase my daily intake of water to three litres, from the three pints I roughly guesstimated on the spur of the moment when the headache consultant asked how much I usually drink.
Three litres is one heck of a lot – believe me, after a week of this I feel practically afloat in my own living room.
It wasn’t quite so bad when the weather was sweltering. I quite easily reached my target. To be honest, I suspect if I bragged about this too much I would be told that rather more than the three litres is needed on such days in order to replace continual gentle leakage from sweat glands all over the body, but anyhow – it is a great deal harder when the weather is dull, rainy and actually rather chilly. This now feels much more like a form of torture (ok, I exaggerate, but it has become a burdensome inconvenience for sure). As per usual when something doesn’t agree with me, I am randomly researching alternative plans so that I can justify not bothering to continue with this eau-so-annoying plan.
But I conclude that I must give this a fair chance. People have told me that it doesn’t all have to be water. Well, maybe not, and I know that many foodstuffs help to meet the liquid intake requirement, and there are many alternative beverages, but that somehow doesn’t help me much.
All my life, I have been vaguely aware that I consume less than ideal amounts of liquid. We had a range of nasty squashes to flavour our water when I was a child, (initially this was the sickly Welfare Orange I remember collecting from the baby clinic, situated in the old Tithe Barn in our village – I have bizarrely clear visual and olfactory memories of this clinic, which was not as romantic as it perhaps sounds to those of you who were not rural babies), we were forced to drink milk (which I hated to such an extent that my normally law-abiding infant-school self would devise all sorts of plans to get out of drinking it, especially in summer when it was warm and creamy – I am almost heaving at the thought of it now) and were sometimes allowed fizzy pop at the weekend. I’m not sure I ever particularly liked any of it.
My mother regularly exhorted me to drink more until my liquid of choice became Pernod in my mid-teens, and she quietly gave up.
I abandoned tea completely at some point before I became an adult. I’m told I drank it sometimes when younger, but can hardly imagine it now and never touch the stuff – apart from very occasional instances when it is practically or socially unavoidable, in which case I can just about get through a cup of hot black unsweetened without gagging.
I love coffee, but in the past decade I have reduced my intake to one cup of caffeinated and another one (or two at most) of decaffeinated per day.
All the rest of my liquid is plain tap water. No calories, no tooth decay, no after-taste, no stains or stickiness if split. Ideal.
So, three litres of water it is.
Filling up another pint glass (approx 500ml if filled to the top). As it is such a miserable day today, I still have 1500ml to go. Partly because I’ve been sitting with an empty glass beside me for hours while writing this. Ho hum.
Water, water everywhere, Ev’ry bloody drop to drink