Back in the 70s, when a man would rather drink crude oil than sip Perrier with his mates, we drank hardly any bottled water. Saying that, we didn’t have email, Jonathan King was employed and you had to leave the pub between lunchtime and early doors, so we weren’t that clever.

Thirty years on, post Thatcher, post Major, post the other one, post Blair, we drink 200 times more bottled water and the market in Britain is worth close to £2 billion.

The expense to the planet is almost beyond measure, given that up to 600 more kg’s of C02 is released from producing 1 litre of imported water compared to that which comes from the humble tap.

Our environment minister, Phil Woolas, has banned bottled water from his government office and has declared it to be “morally unacceptable,” (the water, not the office), because a billion people around the world, some of them living next to bottling plants, don’t have safe water in any form.

Steady on Phil, you’ll be saying that we shouldn’t invade sovereign states to protect our oil interests next. Talking of America, they spend $12 billion a year on bottled water, mainly because, like us, they’ve been led to think it is a cleaner, more convenient product than tap water, even though – as is the case in Europe - several top-selling brands originate from local, public water supplies, not from mountain lakes.

Nothing wrong with the product itself, or the smartness of bottling something free and persuading people pay to for it, but let’s call it how it is. We are all hypocrites to a certain extent, even environmentalists will sup from the forbidden cup, and drinking more water from any source is indeed good for the body and the soul, but we have to get our heads round the fact that water is fast becoming a luxury only a few can afford, and sooner or later you might be excluded from the few who have enough money to drink it like, er, water.

So let’s make tap water cool again. And we don’t’ mean leave it running until its cold enough to drink. Let’s raise a glass of H2O to the fact that we live in a society where the earth’s most precious resource, the one that we need to function, flows freely and safely into our homes whenever we want it.

How come we are not amazed by that privilege every second of every day? Are we mad? Next time you brush your teeth or fill the kettle, imagine if you had to walk ten miles to queue for five hours just to get a bucket full of the stuff. And before you order that £10 bottle of filtered, volcanic, pure liquid sex, remember the same experience comes free from your loyal friend in the kitchen.

It may not look as good in your hand but it will taste and do just as much good in your mouth. OK, so if you start demanding tap in restaurants they’ll start to charge you more for the food, but the total bill will be the same at the end of the meal, your experience will be the same and the atmosphere will have hundreds of times less CO2 pumped into it. #

If you want to go even further, some restaurants encourage diners to donate money every time they order tap water to support Unicef’s campaign to provide clean drinking water in third-world countries.

Tappening.com is a US campaign to promote tap water and also a business that sells reusable, well-designed hard plastic and stainless-steel water bottles via its website. Priced at $14.95 each, the bottles carry slogans, “Think Global, Drink Local” and “What’s Tappening?” The next range will read, “I bottle my own water.”

So what do you think? Is it time to ban the bottle altogether? Would that put a strain on public supply? Or is it our right to buy and drink as we please, so long as we dispose of our bottle responsibly and do other good things to save the planet?

Messages in a bottle please.