When you’re drawing up your gift of presents for your loved ones this Christmas, make sure you go heavy on the soaps, shampoos, bath gels, conditioners, J Cloths, surface cleaners and toilet ducks because there’s going to be one hell of a cleanup in every household this Christmas before we have to start paying through the nose for the water.
Yes, the miserable feckers have gone and ruined the Christmas on us already by dampening the festive fever and by ensuring that as soon as we sing the last bars of Auld Lang Syne and get a salt-and vinegar-flavoured grope from some octogenarian in the pub as the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve, that life will no longer be like it was before.
From that moment on, as you take the denture marks out of your cheeks, you will have to think twice before you get to use any of the valuable resource that surrounds this bloody island and which teems down on top of us for more than 300 days a year. Having taxed every other thing they could, they looked to the skies and said “now that’s an idea, if only we can sell it”. And so they have, sending out their bruiser Big Phil to tell us what we have to look forward to as the clock ticks into 2012.
Waking up in a drunken stupor in a crumpled heap on January 1 is no longer an option, because getting yourself clean and straightened out will hit you in the pocket. As if the Irish psyche was not guilt-and angst-ridden enough, now we have to take that feeling into the shower with us. As every trickle of the transparent stuff falls onto our filthy bodies, as we caress our rippled torsos with the luxuriant suds of the bath gel you stole from the hotel in the Tiger days, you’ll be wondering if we really should be engaging in this guilty pleasure when the water could be put to better use making tay, or heating the child’s bottle or manicuring the dog.
No longer will the flush of the latrine be done without a sense that it is going to cost you. You will engage in the ancient practice of ‘tying a knot in it,’ to save a few cents. The dry shaves will return, the cat’s lick with the facecloth will replace the luxurious shower. Children will once again go to school with dirt on their faces, (barefoot through the fields, Alice ).
Even watering the stumps of the hedges that were burnt away by the deep frost of winter is no longer open to us. The fountain in Eyre Square which was only switched on every time Halley’s Comet does a flyby, will fall silent permanently...
The Government say that the charge is to force people to cut down on the wastage of water, but given that almost half the water produced in this country leaks from the Dickensian pipes before it gets to the houses, you would think that maybe sticking a finger in those dykes would be the right place to start before they start charging for it.
A new body, Irish Water, is to be set up and you can be sure this quango will have a highly paid chief exec and acolytes - plus ça change and all that...and within the year, the lucrative tender to supply water meters to a million households will be offered out to someone. The only good side is that many jobs will be created in fitting these water meters.
They say that the money from the water charge will be ringfenced and used for services like the fire brigade. Hmmm, I suppose if one does have a fire now, even a small one, it would be cheaper to call out the fire brigade than waste your expensive water trying to put it out yourselves.
So, as this country moves into a new watershed, appreciate your water, watch it as it lashes into your kettle, take time in your shower, sink into the deep foam of your bath and whisper to your rubber duck, “I’ll miss you, good friend. I’ll miss you.”
