Living for Disco

Imagine you are an Elizabethan sailor, spending months at sea in a stinking wooden galleon.  You don’t know where you are, you’re riddled with scurvy and you’re running out of grog.  Don’t forget – you believe that baths are unhealthy, and try to wash as little as possible. 

You hear a cry – land ho!  It appears to be a shimmering stretch of untouched beach.  Little do you know that you have washed up on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, so named because no-one embarks on the journey across the pitiless desert into the interior and lives to tell the tale. 

But you and your shipmates brave the glaring heat and stagger, sweating and delirious across one of the world’s most inhospitable stretches of land.  And lo, miracle of miracles, after a couple of months you come upon a shining city, filled with oddly dressed people, and noisy horseless carriages.   You are completely disorientated, not to mention a bit bloody hot, seeing as the temperature in the strange city is around 34 degrees C (93F for old skoolers).  The thing you fancy most of all is a drink, and maybe a bit of a swim to cool down, which is handy, because look!  Here is a sparkling reservoir.  You all cast yourselves fully clothed (because you haven’t removed your stained and flea-ridden apparel for about a year, so why start now?), and joyfully frolic about in the clean, clear water until it is a sea of murk.  You probably fart in it quite a lot too, just for the bubbly fun.

From the colour of the water gushing from our taps today, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this had actually happened.  I try not to drink unfiltered Windhoek water anyway, even though supposedly you can, because it gives me a stomach like Clapham Junction, and tastes as if rodents have been marinated in it.  However it will do at a push – usually, at least. 

But now?  Now I just can’t shake the image of scabby sea-dogs scurfing into MY drinking water.