You’re drinking Neanderthal wee

I DON’T know, it seems cockeyed to me.

We want people to stop using water so we give them money.

All this talk about cash incentives from the council for using things like water-saving shower heads, like they do on the Gold Coast, is going to sell a lot of shower heads – but will it save water?

If they pay me more money — a lot more money — I’ll promise never to wash again, but it won’t solve the problem, which is too many people.

They’re still making people but they’ve stopped making water.

I looked it up. Did you know that the amount of water on the planet has never changed. The problem, apparently, is that clouds don’t scud in from other galaxies. They go round and round the world picking up water and dropping it again somewhere else.

Basically this means we are all drinking the wee of every hairy-arsed Neanderthal that ever lived on the planet, not to mention the dinosaurs, the camels, and everyone down the pub last night.

Except that with any luck the stuff from the pub won’t get back to being clouds for several centuries.

Actually, not necessarily. It’s a well-known fact that in London and other major world centres the water you drink was inside someone else last week!

Instead of giving cash incentives to the bloke in the street maybe they should spend the money researching how to train clouds to leak over carefully selected places (like Townsville) at carefully selected times (at night).

Or on very big pipelines – from Russia.

Did you know there’s a lake — Lake Baikal — in Russia that holds a quarter of all the fresh water in the world.

Now there’s a dangerous international situation. We don’t have enough and they’ve got lots.

The current international scenario under these circumstances is that George Bush decides they’re manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and harbouring international terrorists. Then we go in and destroy the place so they can sell us what we want — in this case water — so they can build the place up again.

It’s ironic really: we can fly to Mars but we can’t pipe a bucket of fresh water from here to Paluma.

Which actually strikes me as a Good Thing. It means that everyone in Paluma has to drink tank water, and tank water is to town water what champagne is to lemonade.

Do you have any idea what they put in town water to make it good for you! Chlorine, aluminium oxide, calcium carbonate, fluoride.

It varies from place to place and country to country but in my experience it all tastes like something the camels, dinosaurs and Neanderthals left behind, but I suppose you get used to it. And at least you don’t have worms swimming down the pipes into your teacup.

It’s not a coincidence that this is the International Year of Freshwater. The experts are worried. They reckon that in 20 years we’ll all be managing on a third of what we have now.

Except of course that it won’t work like that. What will happen is that some people will carry on as they are and some will have none.

Except of course, that it won’t work like that either. Some people will have it all and some people will just die!

There is one solution though that will cure the world water problem at a stroke.

Shoot my daughter.

Or find some other way of keeping her out of the shower.