Further to the Christmas sprout, it’s whale water time! On the back of the saga of the Thames whale, I note on ebay some new items offered. One is the genuine watering can used to keep the famous cetacean hydrated in its last hours on the planet. Another is a jar of the supposed Thames water that came from said can. Now I can see the point of raising money for charity, but the people who get in on the back of good causes, well.

OK, selling the watering can is fair enough, but trying to sell whale water too? This just reminds me that all the water on this planet has been here since the earth first formed. There are an estimated 326 million trillion gallons of the stuff, 97% of it held in the oceans. Nothing added. Not much taken away. Which means that everything you drink has potentially been through millions of bodies: dinosaurs, ants, trees, paupers, Presidents, murderers, dogs, hedgehogs, poets, squid, plankton, sea cucumbers, fish and yes, even whales! I find that quite humbling. Point is you could label any jar of H2O up and still rightly claim that it was whale water. Pinning it down to one specific whale is the hard thing. More on water here and yes, I AM BITTER.

What ‘jars’ me most is that I didn’t think of it first.