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Posted on 07/12/2003 7:44:47 AM PDT by propertius

On one side of the cigarette packet in front of me, printed in letters large enough to be seen from outer space, is the warning: "Smoking kills". On the other, in only slightly smaller letters, is the information: "Smoke contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide". Yum, yum.

But I am not going to bore on again about the joys of tobacco - except to say in passing that, if Parliament ever imposes a complete ban on smoking in public places, as demanded the other day by the Government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Anderson, then I will finish the job that Guy Fawkes started before he was so rudely interrupted 400 years ago.

My purpose today is to draw attention to the dangers of a far more lethal substance, a bottle of which happens to be standing on my desk beside the cigarette packet. I have no idea how it got there, because I never touch the stuff. Perhaps it was left by a death-defying secretary, before she was whisked off to hospital, suffering from its effects.

It is no exaggeration to say that this fluid has killed many tens of thousands of times more people than tobacco ever will. Yet there is not a hint of a government health warning on the bottle in front of me.

The only information about it is contained in a list of ingredients, printed in minuscule type on the label: "Aluminium, calcium, magnesium, sodium, chloride, fluoride, nitrate, potassium, sulphate, copper, iron". I advise people who drink it to steer clear of electromagnets, with all that metal rattling around inside them.

The bottle on my desk, as you will have guessed, contains water, which has been killing people by the million since it wiped out the entire human population of the Earth, bar eight, in Noah's Flood. It has been responsible for spreading more diseases - cholera, typhoid, dysentery, chronic diarrhoea, hepatitis A and dozens of others - than any other substance known to man. As I write, more than two billion people all over the world are said to be at risk from the water they drink.

Water and its dangers have been much in the news over the past couple of weeks. First Anthony Andrews, who played Sebastian Flyte in the televised version of Brideshead Revisited, fell unconscious after drinking eight litres of the stuff, in a misguided attempt to beat the effects of heat and voice strain. He was rushed off to hospital, where he was kept for several days on a drip (the hair of the dog that bit him?). Later he said that he owed his life to the quick thinking of his driver, who had whisked him off immediately to the accident and emergency department, clearly knowing the dangers of drinking too much water.

Then there was that peculiar health scare started by Professor Jeni Colbourne, the head of something called the Drinking Water Inspectorate. She warned that bottled mineral water could be as much as two years old by the time it reached the supermarket checkout.

"People have a perception that bottled water is fresh because it has been sealed in a bottle, unsullied by human hands," she said. "But in fact it has probably spent most of that time in hot warehouses and on hot supermarket shelves." We were obviously meant to be alarmed.

I say that her warning was peculiar, because I had always assumed that water kept for tens, thousands, millions of years without going off. Prof Colbourne clearly thinks otherwise - and she, of all people, should know.

But my favourite story was that line in Katharine Hepburn's obituary, which described the sufferings of the cast and crew during the filming of The African Queen in 1951: "On location in Africa, everyone suffered from malaria and diarrhoea - everyone, that is, save John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, neither of whom ever drank any water."

It is clear that Bogart and Huston wisely shared the dislike of water so succinctly expressed by W C Fields, who also preferred something stronger. Fish conceive their young in it, he pointed out, although he didn't put it quite like that.

The Government's Health and Safety Executive must not rest until it has posted warning signs at 10-yard intervals along every beach and river-bank, and around every municipal pond in the country: "Danger! Water may cause drowning". Every tap in the land, every bottle of mineral water on the supermarket shelves, should carry the warning: "Water causes fatal diseases".

But I must stop now, before Tony Blair takes me seriously and sets up a working group to look into ways of issuing public warnings about the dangers of water. For the tragedy is that my fantasy is not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. So safety-conscious has the nation become that we are all constantly treated like five-year-old imbeciles.

You can see it in the message printed on every sachet of Nytol Sleep Aid: "Warning: may cause drowsiness". Or on the packets of peanuts sold by Sainsbury's: "Warning: contains nuts".

You can see it in the visit that I had at my desk this week from a lovely woman called Daphne, the company nurse. She wanted to make sure that I had the right sort of chair, that my computer screen didn't flicker in a way that would be bad for my eyes and that I was able to tilt my keyboard to make typing comfortable.

The idea of all this was to make sure that I didn't contract what used to be called repetitive strain injury - although I could have told her that nobody with Tory leanings has ever contracted RSI. It is a disease that afflicts only socialists and union activists.

I cannot blame Nytol, Sainsbury's or my employers for being nervous. I would be, too, in an age in which company executives can expect to be sued at the drop of a hat - or, worse still, dragged off to the courts to face charges of corporate manslaughter.

It is just that I find all this nannying profoundly depressing. Go on, live dangerously. Have a fag. Or, if you are feeling really brave, drink a glass of water.

Book her, Dano.
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Mandrake, have you ever heard of the fluoridation of water?

But my favourite story was that line in Katharine Hepburn's obituary, which described the sufferings of the cast and crew during the filming of The African Queen in 1951: "On location in Africa, everyone suffered from malaria and diarrhoea - everyone, that is, save John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, neither of whom ever drank any water."

C'mon, you tellin' me Bogey and John weren't imbibing in the Blue Stuff?? :)

And how 'bout a few add-ins ...

(Oh, it's happy hour, all right!!)

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