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Football Fans and Bottled Water

Stuart Butler

Friday, April 30th, 2004

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Private water companies
Are supposed to be pragmatic utilities
Rather than aquatic futilities,
But like lambs to the slaughter
We buy all this bottled mineral water
And so why then do we do it?
Isn’t it snobbery to pay 120 odd p
For such a bottle
When the wisdom of Aristotle
Says such a small sum of money
When invested wisely,
Worked out on the laptop
Would buy 1500 pints from the tap top.
1 bottle to 1500 pints is such an unfair exchange
You must be deranged to even consider it,
So then why do people do it?
Is it freedom of choice,
(A delusion of snobbery),
Or a watertight case of straightforward robbery?
Well my own presumption
Thinks it’s conspicuous consumption
By those lacking gumption
And with more money than sense.
But anyway,
A recent “Which” survey
Which surveyed down your way
Found that it just isn’t healthier
To make yourself less wealthier
By thinking you oughta
By these bottles of water.
Indeed, expert discriminative tasters
Would appear to be indiscriminate wasters
For these blindfolded fat gaseous saps
Couldn’t tell the bottled from the tapped,
So if the experts can’t even tell
If it’s heavenly bottled or tap water hell,
What chance do we stand?
And then there’s the upper class gourmet
Who spends £5 straight right way
On a bottle of aerated water
Because he couldn’t possibly ask for
A glass of working class water;
And then there’s the bourgeois who savour
Designer added fruit flavour
Retailing in expensive stacked rows
Down in stores like Sainsburys and Waitrose;
I’m afraid these designer cool additives
Make middle class football fans hyperactively laddative,
And not at all middle class and fastidious
Instead they get angry and bilious,
They foam at the mouth
When stopping their drought,
So then why do we buy this stuff?
Approach tap water in such a huff?
My wife’s mate, Doreen,
Says it’s because of the chlorine,
And says all privatisation’s achieved
Is to pollute the air that we breathe,
And turn our rivers into one septic sink,
So we can’t trust the water we drink.
So, bottle or tap,
It’s the same old trap,
Whichever way you vote,
You get a pain in the throat,
And whichever way it goes,
You end up paying through the nose;
Private water companies?
Who’d ‘av ‘em?
Let’s liquidate them

© Stuart Butler

Notes

A bottle of water – the middle class dummy, as it’s been called.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/football-fans-and-bottled-water/