By

Craig Ennew

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Thirty-Two: Bottled Up

This week: Craig measures out his life with water bottles

Want to know where you sit in the family’s pecking order? I think I can help. Look at the quality of the water bottle you’re using

On a recent training day at work, I watched a colleague from the Maths Department sitting in the row in front of me, sucking from a battered bottle with pink flowers on it and a large sticker across the front reading ‘Maisie’.  His descent had clearly been spectacular and brutal.  I felt like clasping his hands in commiseration and saying, son: I feel your pain.   

I recall the heady days of my youth when vanity and naivety drew me towards the higher end of the water bottle market. Perusing the shelves of John Lewis and Lakeland where rows of ergonomic metallic receptacles with tactile brushed surfaces stood shiny and new, I remember choosing my favourite, having felt its reassuring weight in both hands.  Back home, I was Ken to try it out. The rasping sound of the pleasingly clunky stopper screwing and unscrewing thrilled my ear, and the water stayed fresh and cold, with a clean metallic tang that rehydrated my working day.  Hell,  I’d even managed to source one that not only colour-coordinated with my rucksack but that also fitted perfectly into its snug side pocket.

But within a few weeks, disaster struck.  Outside of my watch, The Boy had claimed my precious acquisition as his own.  In an act of stealth, he’d taken it to school, then promptly ‘misplaced’ it, never to set eyes on it again.

Irritated beyond reason, I bought a second.  This was definitely mine, I said.  No-one else was to touch it under any circumstances. Two weeks later, it too had vanished. I was puce with rage.

I decided to lower my sights and visit Mountain Warehouse.  This time, I bought one of those plastic affairs with the built-in straws – cheaper, but with a few pleasing gimmicks still. This one had a double-cap, one of which had a little locking catch.  It was cast in plastic of a vivid orange (my favourite colour) and had faint lines which showed you how much you should have guzzled by a certain point in the day – always handy if you are forced to ration liquids in the middle of an arid, apocolyptic wasteland.

A few mornings later, as I was in the kitchen filling it from the tap, my wife asked tentatively: ‘Is it alright if The Boy borrows your water bottle?’

I looked across to her, outraged. ‘Certainly not!’ I cried, flinging the cupboards open. ‘Look! He’s got millions of them! He can have any one of those – he’s lost two of mine already!’ There on the shelf, the remaining flasks teetered like an exhausted battalion that had suffered heavy military defeat, their companions missing-in-action in the battlefields of various playgrounds and classrooms across Wiltshire and Dorset.

‘Those ones all leak,’ she said.  ‘I’ve tested them out.  He can’t go to school without water – he’ll dehydrate.’

I looked across their sorry ranks.  They were a sight to behold – teats chewed within an inch of their lives, most with caps missing or hanging on for dear life by the thinnest shred of plastic.  Sighing, I handed my bottle over, knowing that it too was bound for the same pitiful fate as its comrades. 

Many such containers have passed through The Boy’s hands over the years, from the early Tommee Tippees of toddlerdom to ‘Peppa Pig’ and ‘Bing’ merchandise as he started nursery.  After that there came the blue ‘Paw Patrol’ bottle, and then, as The Boy hit school age, the less embarrassing range from the lucrative Harry Potter and Spiderman franchises. 

We have parted with hard-earned cash for bottles that have, quite frankly, been on the absurd side of practical. Foolishly, we succumbed (as I suspect have many parents) to the Air-Up craze. At thirty quid a pop, you are effectively getting a slightly snazzier water bottle with a dubious USP: As you swallow, the spiel goes, the air travels to your olfactory region, where your brain ‘tastes’ a hint of the scent—all while you’re drinking plain water. It’s science, but it feels like magic!

Actually, it doesn’t.  It feels more like a bloody rip-off; like drinking tap water in a Fabreze factory.  As far as I’m concerned, Air-Up can take their magic and shove it right up their olfactory region.

We also had a spate of Stanley water bottles.  Weighing as much as a modest tool-box, these bad boys are armoured like tanks and, when dropped,  explode with as many decibels as one opening fire.  The Boy has worked his way through a number of these – a lurid green Grinch affair springs to mind – but there were many others.  When the inevitable happened and they vanished too, he’d spotted  one of those beasts in Sports Direct that was the size of a Flogas cannister – you know the ones: you have to strap it to your body like an oxygen tank and it tells you on the side how many litres you should have guzzled by morning break.

‘Your son seems to need to go to the toilet quite often,’ his teachers remarked, as he lugged the thing around, both boy and tank making deep slooshing noises with every movement.

As quickly as any of these materialised, they were as quick to vanish. We seemed to be purchasing new – and increasingly cheap – water bottles on an almost weekly basis, occasionally resorting to fishing empty bottles of Volvic out of the car to refill.  Regularly, we gave The Boy an ultimatum:  bring some of the lost bottles back from school or get sent in with Mum’s water bottle with pretty flowers etched onto it. This didn’t seem to bother him too much, but sometimes, if we were lucky, we were greeted by him coming through the school gates with fists full of water bottles, and more tucked under each arm.  Sadly, it turned out that most of them belonged to other people.

As a teacher. I know that our lad is not alone in his gross acts of water bottle complacency.  I could lead you into any classroom in any school and show you orphaned water bottles, sitting forlorn and abandoned between piles of textbooks. Perhaps someone can turn them all into bags for life or something.

Now we are freshly moved into The Shack, any such receptacle is even more hard to come by.  Indeed, anything at all is hard to come by as much of our lives remains packed into one of the four sheds on the property.  Consequently, we grown-ups drink from two lowly mugs. And that’s all we have.   Morning tea? Mugs.  Water at night? Self-same mugs.   G&T or wine?  That’ll be those tea-stained, grimy-rimmed scuzzy mugs again.  Sans dishwasher, we wash them by hand but you can never get them back to white that way, and there’s something very grim about pouring  white wine over stubborn dirt-brown tea stains. In fact, the whole thing sickens me; it has almost put me off drinking wine.  Almost.

My lovely wife continues to make our cups of tea of a morning. She’ll wash up the mugs, plug the kettle into one of three sockets we have access to, fish the milk from the cooler box, then swirl and dump the tea bags into whatever receptacle we’re using as the bin.

In a recent (and, to my shame, rare) moment of gallantry, I offer to make the morning tea.  Bleary-eyed and wearing just t-shirt and cacks, I stagger from my mattress across the wasteland, perplexed at how such a simple and well-practised routine can become so complicated by the adverse circumstances of a house renovation.  I mean, what am I even supposed to fish the bloody tea-bags out with?

‘Do we actually have a spoon handy?’  I yell back to my wife, abandoning any thought of waking her gently with her cuppa.

Somewhere under her orange duvet, there are movements.  ‘I usually just use one of the forks,’ she mumbles. Then, knowing what’s coming next, she adds.  ‘Which are in the washing up bowl.  Which is near the bags of cement near to where the front door is going to be.’

A few minutes later, I place the tea down beside her on the unfinished floor, with a resentful clunk.  I turn and plod away, fork held aloft, tea trickling down my inner arm.  Absent-mindedly, I wipe the dribbling fork on the arse of my pants. I turn to see my wife watching me with one exposed eye.

“New low,” she mumbles.

©Craig Ennew 2025

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