Adventures in Food

For the benefit of those of you, i.e everyone in the world except me, Sarah and a certain female German book-seller trading in Kew, who haven't read Ulrike Bulle's comments concerning my mineral water tirade earlier in the month, the picture you are idly gazing at whilst reading this latest blog entry is that of a bottle of bone fide Hammersmith tap water which has been filtered clean of stomach gremlins and presented us sweetly as a gift. Mmm! Now rumour has it there is an inexaustible supply of this particular variety of H2O flowing under the surface of southwest London, so both Sarah and myself look forward to toasting Ulrike's very good health with the stuff for as long as the diet continues. Does it taste different to Richmond tap water? I hear you ask. Buggered If I know!

O.k, so there are a few of you out there with slightly more discerning tastes than mine - sensitive souls who can indeed differentiate the subtle flavours of water into categories of good and bad, hard and soft, wet and not-so-wet and so on. I am willing to be educated on this subject by anyone patient enough to teach me. After all, this is a diet of discovery and I am humble enough to suppose the possibility of enlightenment. But the more important point I was attempting to make, though it was seemingly lost in all my spitting, is that, although it is fine to have these pleasantly packaged foreign brands on our shelves, Perrier in particular seems to have become a national institution, a mainstream favourite, and that emphasises beautifully mine and Sarah's argument that people in this country are not emoting with what is being grown and produced in their own corners of the world. Clear, crisp, unadulterated mineral water cascades over the rocks of each and every range of hills in...

Water, water, everywhere, and it's all a lot of poncey crap from Italy and France, beautifully packaged and carefully marketed, that wends its way into the receptacles of Londoners who use it as prop to help them make believe their city is chic like Paris when it is nothing of the sort, it is just the grubby old capital of a country that obtains its water from across the sea. The point I am trying to make, through this un-dignified rant, is that water is indeed everywhere and it all tastes the bloody same. Perrier, for instance, though I could have easily picked out Badoit, Barisart or Pellegrino, arrives on the shelves of our abundant supermarkets in sexy looking, stylish bottles that are pleasing to the human eye. There is little wrong with this, beauty has its place. The home should be filled with gorgeous things. But it's the human tongue that counts here and mine says the only dissimilar thing its buds can gauge between the continental waters and our very own mountain spri...