Bottle of Water

I remember it well. It was the summer of 1980, and I was a young engineer, living in Youghal with my wife. No kids yet – not that it matters, but people always seem to want to know these things.

Anyway, I was on the road from Dungarvan to Kilkenny, somewhere between thoughts about Computers and wondering what was for dinner, when I spotted a lad thumbing for a lift in LemyBrien. It was raining sideways, as is tradition, so I pulled over. He climbed in, soaked to the bone, nodded his thanks, and off we went.

Now, he didn’t say much at first. Silent type. We drove for a while in that companionable, awkward silence you get when you’re not sure if your passenger is a poet or a lunatic. Eventually, I asked him what he did for a living.

And that, my friend, was the key to the ignition of madness.

The lad lit up and launched into this breathless monologue about a brilliant idea he’d had while living in France. “Bottled water!” he said, eyes wild with enthusiasm. “Imagine it – clean, fresh water… but in a bottle!”

I blinked at him. In Ireland. The country where water falls from the sky for free, and often sideways. Bottling water sounded about as profitable as selling sand to the Arabs.

But I nodded politely, dropped him in Kilkenny, and wished him luck on his mad quest to convince the Irish to pay for what came out of every tap in the country.

That evening, I told my wife about the lunatic I’d picked up. We laughed ourselves silly over dinner. I remember her taking a swig of tea and saying, “There’s a fool born every minute.”

Now, it’s forty-odd years later. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, cracking open a bottle of water – Ballygowan, no less – and I can’t help but wonder:

Who was the fool back then?