Is the tap on?
To the casual observer, it might appear as though I love a tap. After all, I spend a sizeable chunk of my time staring intently at them, touching them repeatedly, even running back into the room at midnight to check that they’re okay. You know that thought-exercise you do in GCSE Maths, where you have to explain what left and right are to a visiting alien, and it’s completely impossible to do? Well, that’s what I like to think an alien would think about my bedtime habits — that I just love taps and I can’t get enough of them. You know the type I’m on about, a lovely kitchen tap. Sometimes a bathroom one, if I feel like it.
Well, I don’t love taps. In fact, on a bad day, I might be inclined to call them the bane of my existence. I would much rather have a well in the flat, because at least I could be reassured that it wouldn’t drip incessantly all night, causing the water bill to rise at an exponential rate. That reminds me, I really must log onto my Thameswater account soon. I bet wells don’t regularly flood the flat, causing wood floors to blister in a way that costs thousands of pounds to sort out. Saying that, I have no idea about the veracity of that statement. Perhaps they do flood. All I’m saying is that I’d much rather have water down a hole than perched precariously in pipes and tubes, just waiting for the most inopportune moment to burst their banks.
Or perhaps it would be nice to have a well in the centre of town, perhaps just outside the Whitgift centre so that everybody in Croydon could come and gather at the Fairfields watering hole, chat and swap stories, just like our ancestors did. I could wake up early each day and walk to the well, scoop up our flats’ daily allotment of water and then walk back again, having increased my step count and freed myself from the tyranny of my tap-related anxiety. Just kidding, I could never wake up that early. Maybe we could devise a system where you have to book a slot to pick up your daily water, just like Click and Collect. And then you’d have the stress of being hunched over your laptop waiting for the best slot to come up so that you could avoid the rush-hour crush of people demanding their daily water. And then the posh ones could book an online delivery slot for their water, or maybe they’d just go to Waitrose and get bottled sparkling instead.
It would an interesting social experiment I think. But I suppose I would just find something else to agonise over each day. Like whether our water bucket was the right way up. Or perhaps I’d convince myself that someone was contaminating the well with asbestos or lye or even just their own phlegm and that I would inevitably die of poisoning or contract an STD. And to be honest, I don’t think it would be particularly surprising if that did happen. I don’t trust the general public, especially around Croydon. Maybe the government would put mild stimulants into the water and society would turn into Brave New World. That would be a disaster. Although if they were secreting anti-depressants in there, I might be tempted to just go along with it. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
If they (the aliens) saw me running around my flat at quarter past eleven on a Wednesday night checking that all the candles were out and that the shower wasn’t dripping and that the oven timer wasn’t accidentally on, I’m sure they’d find it hilarious. I have no idea if aliens have taps or whether they simply hydrate themselves through am incredibly sophisticated form of intergalactic osmosis. I’d be very jealous if they did hydrate themselves through some sort of porous membrane. I wish the human body worked in that way. I could just spend my entire life in the bath. And life is always better in the bath.