Iain Murray: Crackpot ideas that don’t hold water – or do they?

Roll on the recession. It may compel Dr Peter Rogers and his team to find decent jobs, such as emptying parking meters or manning the huge Blair watchtowers soon to spring up over the UK to spot illicit fox hunts.

In the meantime Dr Rogers, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol, can continue to enjoy his tests on the effects of drinking cold water.

His studies have concluded that people who drink cold water when they are not thirsty experience an immediate drop in brain power.

Rogers and his colleagues – this work is beyond the capability of one man alone – tested the effects of water on 60 volunteers. They were asked to rate how thirsty they felt before they were given a cup of cool water. Afterwards their reactions were tested by their response to prompts on a computer screen.

All in all, Rogers thinks that drinking too much water may affect the ability to drive or carry out mentally demanding tasks.

The less said about this the better. Politicians and chief constables, ever watchful for novel means of goading motorists, will need little encouragement to introduce a ban on this new and dangerous form of drink-driving. Police patrols equipped with hydrometers could be empowered to stop and test drivers suspected of having an excess of water in their bellies, the outward sign being a doltish facial expression, a feature that many motorists are already known to possess.

Come to think of it, water abuse may explain a lot. Yuppies for example. In the hedonistic days of Thatcher tyranny, when the sweet and generous dispositions for which Britons had been renowned for centuries and which had found their finest expression in trade unionism, were swept aside in a wave of greed and selfishness, rich young people took to drinking water in unprecedented quantities.

Such was their appetite for this new and exciting drink, that a whole industry sprang up to serve them. Designer water became the rage and it was not unknown for yuppies to pay £5 for a bottle of Perrier to accompany their luncheon. It soon became apparent that these people were suffering from catastrophic, and in some cases irreversible, falls in brainpower.

Encouraged by this success, the bottled water industry began to market its products aggressively, with much success. Sales soared as people of all social classes and income groups developed a taste for products that came labelled with such lyricism as: “Over the centuries Scottish rains have laid down the underground source of this pure natural mineral water with a taste and purity renowned the world over. Best before end February.”

Can it be a coincidence that, as we drink more water, we’ve become a nation whose chief interests are football and television?

There are other disturbing signs of this affliction, most noticeably in what used to be called Fleet Street. Before the diaspora that scattered the national press across London, its spiritual home was the many bars that dotted EC4. Journalists drank. Not water. And not because they were thirsty.

Now, in the epoch of work-outs, rocket salads and spring water, something has gone terribly wrong. To take just one example, The Daily Mail, arguably the most successful newspaper of the modern era, is staffed by people who, when pushed, rely on a vocabulary of just one word – “brilliant”.

In last Saturday’s edition alone the paper boasted a “brilliant new partwork” later described as a “brilliant new series”; there was also the first of a “brilliant new series” about Diana, and the announcement that next week the paper was to serialise Jenni Murray’s “brilliant book”, Evelyn Waugh was described as “the brilliant novelist” (the sole instance in which the adjective was justified), and, starting next week, we were promised “our brilliant new sports columnist Robert Hardman – the Voice of the Thinking Fan” – brill!

More evidence of an excess of water was to be found on the centre spread where the Mail announced with a straight face that it had “commissioned one of Britain’s top investigative reporters to examine the Posh phenomenon”.

Can you picture the trench-coated sleuth, equipped with notepad, gumshoes and hip flask of Evian, setting off on the relentless trail that would lead to the reclusive Victoria Beckham?

Meanwhile at the Express, its new proprietor, Richard Desmond, a man whose career to date suggests he is not easily shocked, was astounded to discover that Jane Asher was being paid £200,000 a year to write a weekly item about cakes. Can there be any doubt that when Ms Asher was recruited the then editor Rosie Boycott had been at the water again?

If our nation is to recover its vigour and our national press to regain its pep, we must rid ourselves of this enervating taste for water.

WC Fields, the brilliant (no other word for it) actor and comedian, said a woman drove him to drink and he never had time to thank her. He refused to drink water on the ground that “fishes fornicate in it”. Enough said.