I HAVE about a dozen containers of spring water stacked in my spare bedroom. They are not marked or dated in any way. I just grab the first one that comes to hand, use the contents to fill my kettle or cook a pot of potatoes and, when I have enough empty ones I load them into the car and head off to stand in the queue to fill them again at the nearest spring.
I think most of my neighbours do something similar.
I suspect some of those plastic jars may have been stored for a couple of months by now.
I wonder whether untreated water goes bad. Are there any kinds of bacteria that may breed inside those bottles of water?
I have noticed the water kept in a bucket or pond for a long time eventually goes green. Does this happen in a closed jar?
I find it a mildly worrying thought that there are now literally millions of litres of untreated water in storage in garages and spare rooms across the city waiting for Day Zero.
I don’t suppose many of those containers were sterilised before being carted off to the spring. I don’t see anybody taking particular care when filling the jars from the mountain springs.
The water splashes out over people’s hands and into the jars and I wonder whether we are not sometimes just a little careless.
I also have some interesting thoughts about rainwater being collected from city roofs and stored in all those new Jo-Jo tanks decorating suburban gardens.
Does it not contain a small amount of interesting stuff donated by the pigeons and starlings who share your roof?
I hate to be an alarmist when we are all doing our bit to be careful about using the city’s dwindling water supplies, but I hope here are no colonies of nasty microbes festering happily in our jars and Jo-Jos.
It may be sensible not to use our harvested water and Jo-Jo supplies in their untreated form for drinking unless we boil it first.
This means it’s probably fine for cooking, making tea and washing dishes or flushing the toilet or watering the family pot plants, but if you come home from work needing a drink, use the stuff that comes out of your taps.
Better still, drink wine. It’s 80% water anyway, and it has been filtered through an efficient solar powered purification system commonly known as a grapevine.
I find it an excellent substitute for scarce water.
Last Laugh
Joe was taking his dog for a walk in the park when he met his friend Fred, also walking a dog.
“That’s a good looking dog,” Fred remarked.
“Yes,” said Joe, “but he’s very timid and afraid of almost everything. I call him Cinderella.”
“Cinderella? That’s a very strange name for a dog. Why Cinderella?”
“Because he runs away from the ball.”
* Biggs is a daily columnist for the Cape Argus
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
Cape Argus